Book Image

Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce

By : Robbert Ravensbergen
Book Image

Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce

By: Robbert Ravensbergen

Overview of this book

<p>Building an online store is often considered to be a difficult and complex task. Using the combination of WordPress and the WooCommerce plugin, this is no longer the case. WooCommerce is built using WordPress best practices both on the frontend and the backend. This results in an efficient, robust, and intuitive plugin. Learn to use this strong e-commerce solution and set up your own web shop in just a couple of hours.</p> <p>Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce is a practical guide that delivers the knowledge you require to set up and get going with WooCommerce. This book also shows you how to choose a WooCommerce theme and set up different payment methods, in addition to helping you to keep a bird’s-eye view of incoming sales and reviews, stock levels, general store performance, and statistics from the WordPress dashboard.</p> <p>You will start by installing WooCommerce and exploring the WooCommerce settings. Then, you will move on to creating and adding simple and complex products, and also set up payment and shipping methods. Once your store is up and running, you will learn how to process your orders, look at the reports, and even expand the functionality further with additional plugins. Finally, the book shows you how to choose a WooCommerce theme and adjust the theme settings.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

WordPress theme basics


WordPress theme development in a short version is explained as follows:

  • Every WordPress theme has its own folder, which you may find in the wp-content/themes folder of your WordPress installation.

  • The bare minimum that every WordPress theme needs is an index.php file and a style.css file. The index.php file determines the way the home page looks like, by the so-called WordPress loop. There are also other possibilities for the home page, which we'll see in a minute. The style.css file contains all styling or calls for other CSS files. It also contains the name and author of the theme.

  • From the index.php file, lots of different PHP files can be called. Here are a couple of the most common ones, including their meaning:

    • header.php: This file contains the logic for the header of your theme, which mostly contains things such as the logo, website name, a search bar, and a menu. It also contains the necessary HTML head code.

    • sidebar.php: This file contains the definition of...