Book Image

Mastering WooCommerce - Second Edition

By : Patrick Rauland
Book Image

Mastering WooCommerce - Second Edition

By: Patrick Rauland

Overview of this book

Author Patrick Rauland is a WooCommerce expert with a deep-rooted passion for the platform. Drawing from his multifaceted experience as a customer, WooCommerce support team member, core developer, release leader, and conference planner, he presents the latest edition of this guide to help you master every facet of launching and managing a successful WooCommerce store. From initiation to seamless integration of essential components such as payments, shipping, and tax configurations, this book takes you through the entire process of establishing your online store. You’ll then customize your store's visual identity, optimizing for search engines and advanced sales management through Point of Sale (POS) systems, outsourced fulfillment solutions, and external reporting services. You’ll then advance to enhancing the user experience, streamlining reorders, and simplifying the checkout process for your customers. With this new edition, you’ll also gain insights into secure hosting and bug fixing and be prepared for updates. That’s not all; you’ll build a promotional landing page, ensure store safety, contribute to the WooCommerce community, and design custom plugins for your unique needs. By the end of this WooCommerce book, you'll emerge with the skills to run a complete WooCommerce store and customize every aspect of the store on the frontend as well as backend.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1: Exploring the essentials of an ECommerce Store
6
Part 2: Managing an Online Store
12
Part 3: Customizing the Appearance and Functionality of Your Store

Building a basic WooCommerce plugin

To get started, we want to build a plugin that will run when WooCommerce is activated on a site. If WooCommerce is not active, we don’t want our plugin to run, because that’s a waste of processing power.

We’re going to create a plugin and then we’ll configure it to only load when WooCommerce is active. We need to start by creating a plugin file.

Creating a plugin

To get started, we need to create the plugin files. Plugins are typically stored in the WordPress filesystem under wp-content/plugins/{your-plugin}.

There are two ways of creating plugin files:

  • Use a single plugin file that contains the entire plugin
  • Use a folder with multiple plugin files

The vast majority of plugins use multiple files, so we’re going to create a folder for our plugin. Follow the steps given here:

  1. Under /wp-content/plugins/, add a folder for your plugin. I’m going to call mine woocommerce-example...