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Tibetan Dawn - Txp + Ecommerce
Hello everyone
I’ve just completed this site: www.tibetandawn.co.uk
It uses Textpattern + Paypal + a wee tiny bit of PHP to create what I think is a very neat little ‘entry-level’ Ecommerce solution for small-budget projects.
Thought I’d give some basic information which might be useful to anyone else wishing to use Txp for Ecommerce.
It’s a basic Txp install with a 3 sections for products and 4 sections for information / blog / search / error pages.
Ecommerce is powered by Paypal – I have a form for each item and am using various txp tags to populate the values, etc. of the input fields so each paypal button is being dynamically generated from the article content.
I’m using almost all of the 10 available custom fields to populate various Paypal button form fields and also for extra product detail images.
The <txp:if_custom_field> tag is used to display the ‘More images’ title only if the custom fields have been populated.
Stock control:
I’m also using a custom field for a ‘stock’ level function. Paypal has an ‘IPN’ feedback function which can be used to feedback to the database when purchases have been made, to amend the stock levels. I got a developer colleague of mine to whip-up a small bit of code which lets the IPN function talk to the database. I had to go into phpMyAdmin to find out the field name which would need to be updated, but that was all he required. I also had to login to Paypal, switch on IPN and give the url of the page containing the php code. Cool.
Organisation:
I have three Sections for products – Crafts, Art and Clothing. Each sub-navigation is a category which is listed under the section title using cbs_category_list which lists categories of products within that section, but only if there’s something in them. Nice. It does have a number in brackets next to each category which I couldn’t figure out how to switch off so for now I’ve just made it white to blend-in with the background.
Seperating each content range by Sections means that I can create custom catalogue and product detail pages for each different range. This is useful where certain sections need different information ie. the Clothing section requires users to select a size before hitting purchase so, I created a custom form for this section which removes the buy button from the catalogue pages and includes an extra select drop-down in the Paypal button form.
The following plugins are in use:- cbs_category_list – as mentioned above
- nhn_livecommentpreview – for the blog
- sgb_error_documents and sgb_url_handler for kickass error pages.
Like I said, I’m rather happy with the results. Obviously it’s very much an ‘entry level’ solution and the functionality can only be stretched so far. However, I think it’s great for small budgets / first-time Ecommerce ventures and, because it’s powered by Txp, it is much cleaner and standards-friendly than other open-source ecommerce solutions out there.
Any thoughts / questions?
Cheers
Reuben Whitehouse ~ Rocketfuelled
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#2 2005-12-09 19:07:48
- Jaro
- Member
- From: S/F
- Registered: 2004-11-18
- Posts: 89
Re: Tibetan Dawn - Txp + Ecommerce
Reuben, I think this is one of the best Textpattern driven websites I have seen. Great job!
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#4 2005-12-09 19:59:52
- els
- Moderator
- From: The Netherlands
- Registered: 2004-06-06
- Posts: 7,458
Re: Tibetan Dawn - Txp + Ecommerce
Wow, well done! And looking great too!
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