Book Image

WordPress 2.9 E-Commerce

Book Image

WordPress 2.9 E-Commerce

Overview of this book

WordPress is easily one of the hottest platforms for building blogs and general web sites. With the addition of the WP e-Commerce plug-in, it's also a competent platform for easily creating and running an online store, capable of selling physical items as well as services and digital downloads. WordPress with e-Commerce offers every feature that a seller and a customer may need. You can build an online store that makes it easier for the customers to find and buy products.WordPress 2.9 e-Commerce focuses on the integration of WordPress with the WordPress e-Commerce plug-in, covering all aspects of building and developing an online store from scratch.This book provides a simple, step-by-step approach to developing an effective online store. It guides you through your initial planning and first steps, plug-in installation and configuration, building your catalog of products to sell, accepting payments for your orders, and dealing with taxes and shipping. You will also learn how to promote and market your new store, handle customer accounts and staff roles, and deal with essential store security.As you work through each chapter, your online store will grow in scope and functionality. By the time you finish this book, you will have a complete and working store, ready to release your products to the world.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
WordPress 2.9 -Commerce
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with WordPress and e-Commerce
2
Getting Ready to Sell
3
Configure Your e-Commerce Settings
4
Managing Your Product Catalog
5
User Accounts: Customers and Staff
6
Checkout and Payment Setup
7
Shipping, Taxes, and Processing Orders
Setting Up a WAMP Testing Platform
Index

Appendix B. Setting Up a WAMP Testing Platform

One strong recommendation is to create a testing ground in which to install WordPress and the WP e-Commerce plugin that is independent from your production server. That way you can test, and re-test, any changes without fear of breaking your live site.

Turning your personal computer into a testing platform is simple. We only need a few different tools in order to create a development environment, including:

  • A web server, such as Apache

  • A database server, such as MySQL

  • PHP

  • Supporting libraries

Fortunately, a few free software packages exist that bundle all of these tools together into one centralized program. For the Microsoft Windows operating system, these packages include:

In this section, we will discuss the installation, setup, and basic usage of WampServer.