Folks at WordPress have just released WordPress 3.1 (Code name “Reinhardt”), 14th version of World’s most famous and award-winning publishing software. This release has some fantabulous features like Internal Linking and a WordPress.com styled admin bar on front end which makes it very easy to visit most used features of back-end. Read on to have an overview of some major features of this release.

Internal Linking

We can’t stress enough on the importance of Internal linking for SEO of your WordPress blog. To be honest, the process of Internal linking was pretty painful unless you would use some plugins or hacks to find relevant posts for internal linking. With WordPress 3.1 this is a breeze now. WordPress now have built-in functionality to link your new content with already published content. Below is a screenshot of this kick-ass functionality.

I’ve updated my personal blog and I have to say I’m in love with it.

Admin Bar

If you visit WordPress.com as a logged-in user, you will see a bar at top of page which gives you shortcuts to important and most used areas of backend. With WordPress 3.1, you can enjoy the same functionality on self hosted blogs ;)

However if you don’t like this functionality, you can always disable it by going to your user profile.

Admin area Tweaks

Ajaxification: Latest version of WordPress also has improved the posts area too with Ajaxification. You don’t have to reload pages while searching for posts. Also you can go to specific page number by entering page number itself in Posts admin area. Below is a video for this functionality to even describe it better.

Overhauled Blue Theme of Admin area is also included in this release which looks stunning, a pretty good job done by UX team of WordPress.

Now we will cover new functionality from developer’s point of view.

Post Formats

Battle between WordPress and Tumblr is an open secret. Both of them have been trying to grab each other’s user base. Here at 1wd we are die-hard fans of WordPress and I am not reluctant in saying that I’m biased towards WordPress :) With these new Post formats, WordPress provides you out of the box functionality for creating and styling different type of posts i.e links,chat,photo etc.

Here is a pretty good write-up on post formats by core contributor of WordPress, Otto.

An Even Better CMS

WordPress 3.1 allows you to create advanced taxonomies and call custom field queries.Result of which is WordPress is even better and comprehensive CMS. Matt Mullenweg, Founder of WordPress summed up this pretty well in release post of 3.1.

There’s a bucket of candy for developers as well, including our new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts, new CMS capabilities like archive pages for custom content types, a new Network Admin, an overhaul of the import and export system, and the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries.

With the 3.1 release, WordPress is more of a CMS than ever before. The only limit to what you can build is your imagination.

Here is a list of complete features and changelog in WordPress 3.1. All these exciting changes demand that you should upgrade your WordPress right now :D with no time delay. This update is available in your dashboard and you can download it as well from here

So today I have come up with really beautiful and creative minimal business cards which will make you say wow.

1. I Love Typography

As we all know this popular blog – no surprise they are creating their business card in minimalism and using light, beautiful typography.

2. Business Card: Moretz

In business cards widely used are letterpress and embossed effect, simple texture also here really make card unique.

3. Bhootan

4. My Card

5. Labs

6. Heterobrain

7. Stephen De Wolf

Beautiful simplicity – both sides are exactly opposite each other – black/white, but green line just connects both sides and makes them familiar and related.

8. Gregory J. Wills

Simple, but technically very well spaced business card. Notice how nothing is near the edges, all information is kept in center, image to the left – text to the right in way where is very easy to read it.

9. Fuse

Really black cards with bold,white text just cannot look bad – interesting texture in background just make card more unique.

10. Business card with wooden texture

Simple business card – but with embossed wooden texture really stand out.

11. Elizabeth Maybury

Beautiful typography is this case is really enough for great branding.

12. Business Card

13. B/&W/ONI

14. Personal business card

15. Stav Garts – Photographer

From business card you can tell right away with which profession it’s owner is working in without even reading text. Smart.

16. Flower Lantern

Did you notice different card size?

17. Design With Style

18. Roman Feria

19. Impressions

20. Cotton Business Card

21. Minimalistic

One more photographer business card – again standing out with great photo related associations.

22. Revolta Films

23. 19 Marks

Catchy – card sides are painted orange, little things matter!

24. Argement

Interesting light gradient effects added create professional look with ease.

25. Anatas

26. Sweat Breaker

Nice, big rounded corners grab attention – unique presentation as well.

27. Hoey Design

Letterpress effects are really popular trend lately – but there is a reason for it – great look.

28. Coma Minimal

29. Tower Co

30. Financial Risk Group

31. O2 Fitness

O2 letters have got here all the main attention with sketched like look, very minimal business card with main focus on great typography.

32. Brilliant Business Card

33. Michaelnagy

34. Kelly Kirlin

35. Rent to Own

36. Janelle Williamson

37. BËRTHAMA

38. Vinam

39. P2 Concept

40. GS Stirling

41. Also Know as

42. Amanda Front

43. Ventures

44. T&T

45. Dphotofolio

46. Montage BC

47. Tordai Law Office

48. Merkelbach

49. The Runway

50. The Secret Agent

51. Hero Film

52. T-White

53. Handmade Cafe

54. Steven Whitely

Unique approach – card related with email – measurethrice[at]gmail.com. Interesting.

55. Fundbreak Card

56. Wildorb

57. Visual Treat

58. Project Graphics

59. Yes

60. Vevia

Today I am going to tell you my bad experience with one of the leading web hosts of Industry, Dreamhost. After starting with them, I was very happy with their shared servers but things went bad when I moved to Dreamhost PS. My personal tech blog was having so much down times that uptime went to 94% in just 2 weeks and to even surprise you more, it happened after moving to Dreamhost Personal Servers (which are designed to handle big traffic, at least is their words). After so many ticket queries and live chat, there was no solution hence I decided to move to a new web host as Crispy Tech needed a personal server for its traffic.

If you want to keep an eye on your web host, Its very necessary that you use a website monitoring service which notifies you when your website goes down.

Today we have come up with best free website monitoring services which help you to monitor your website. It was easy for me to write an article with 20 website monitoring services but I have only included the best ones which we have actually used before.  So let’s start.

1. Uptime Robot

A Quick Look

• Price: Free
• Number of Sites You can monitor: 50
• Notification Methods: RSS, Twitter, Email, SMS
• Time Interval for each check: 5 Minutes
• Simple yet effective

Uptime robot is one of the finest and completely free website monitoring services. Co Founded by Umut Muhaddisoglu of WebResourcesDepot, Uptime Robot is our personal choice for monitoring on 1stWD.

The monitoring service has no Premium Plans and their free services are more than enough for any web developer. You can monitor 50 websites for free with options of getting notified with:

• Twitter DM
• RSS
• Email
• SMS.

Pretty awesome. Right?

Uptime Robot checks your website with regular interval of 5 minutes.

In a talk with Umut, he assured us that Uptime Robot will be free till September 2010 and then they will introduce premium plans (In case if they are unable to continue Free Plan) but free plan will still be there with some modifications.  Although the web app is not feature enriched but Its awesome for those who just want the work done with out whistles and bells.

One thing you will fall in love with is the completely Ajaxed interface of Uptime Robot. After signing up, just play with different areas of website and you will enjoy the experience.:)

Missing Features:

We would love to see better support for SMS notifications in UpTime Robot. While writing this review, SMS notifications are not supported World Wide. Another awesome feature would be iPhone/ Android App.

2. Pingdom

A Quick Look

• Price: From Free to 39$/month
• Number of Sites You can monitor: 1 for free
• Notification Methods: RSS, Twitter, Email, SMS
• Time Interval for each check: From 1 Minute to changeable

Pingdom is by far the most comprehensive and enterprise solution for website monitoring services. With all those nifty and expensive plans they also provide the option of a free website monitoring plan which allows you to monitor one website for free.

Pingdom is the biggest guy in thr world of website monitoring services with customers ranging from of Alexa to Mashable.

Pingdom is feature enriched and has its own free iPhone app. With support of Response time tracking, you can also check how your server reponds when it experiences traffic load.

3. Zabbix

Quick Look:

• Self Hosted Solution
• Open Source
• Free

If you are a big fan of Open Source softwares then Zabbix is for you. Its completely free and licensed under GPL v2 which means you are free to do modifications in the core software and pass it on. There are no proprietary restrictions on you.

Zabbix is such a comprehensive tool that a book has been written on it which covers all of its features. There is no pre-hosted version and you will have to install it yourself after downloading it. The tool is pretty complex and I only suggest it for Advanced users.

4. Basic State

A Quick Look

• Price: Free
• Number of Sites You can monitor: Unlimited
• Notification Methods: Email, SMS
• Time Interval for each check: From 1 Minute to changeable

With support of email and SMS notifications, Zabbix is another completely free web monitoring service. You can have unlimited monitors active with Basic state. The web app checks your website’s header with regular intervals of 15 Minutes. Though the home page of basicstate don’t gives a professional look but I have personally tested and was using it before I came to know Uptime Robot.

5. 100 Pulse

A Quick Look

• Price: Free/ Premium Plans
• Number of Sites You can monitor: 2 Websites for Free
• Notification Methods: Email, SMS, Twitter, iGoogle Gadget
• Time Interval for each check: 15 Minutes

100Pulse is another free website monitoring service which comes with an inituitive user interface. The free plan allows you to monitor the status of  two web properties and you will be notified using Twitter, Email and SMS. They also have an option of Google Widget which you can set up on your desktop or iGoogle.

I hope that you liked the article. Which web service do you use for website monitoring? Feel free to share it with us.

1WD: Many of us may be familiar with you because of your website: “Theme Lab” For those who are unfamiliar with you, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your life?

Leland: My name is Leland Fiegel.  I’m a web developer and blogger.  I’m a part-time student, a Lost fanatic, and an NBA fan.  I’ve been running Theme Lab for over two years now as my primary blog.  I talk about WordPress, release WordPress themes, as well as post tutorials and coding tips.

1WD: How did you get started in web development?

Leland: Since I was around 10 years old, I was pretty fascinated with making websites.  I discovered the “View Source” button on my old Internet Explorer browser and examined and played with code until I eventually taught myself HTML.  I made a bunch of fun little sites (none online anymore, unfortunately) and just started getting in the business side of things about 5 years ago, when I started buying domain names, developing websites for them.  My domain addiction carries on to this day, although I’m getting better at not buying every good domain I see nowadays.

1WD:There is always a heated debate on WordPress GPL issue. Will you please share your personal views with us about this matter?

Leland:I’ve said this before, but I don’t believe there is any issue that gets the WordPress community more riled up than GPL-related debates. Arguments about commercial products and services, especially commercial themes, seem to always come back to the GPL in some way.  I personally try to stay out of it as much as I can, as I believe there are much more productive things you could be doing than sitting around arguing about things that have been argued hundreds of times over already.  It’s like beating a dead horse.  Some people might completely boycott non-GPL products, and that’s up to them.  Personally however, I don’t mind promoting non-GPL products as long as  I feel it’s a quality product.

1WD: Premium themes companies are growing like mushrooms. Do you think there is enough room for new WordPress premium theme companies in this over crowded niche?

Leland: It seems a new “premium” theme company pops up every day.  Usually they are started by people noone has every really heard of before, they release a few mediocre themes, and then they’re never heard from again.  These are what I call the “fly by night” sites.  There are other new ones, however, who do a good job managing their credibility and reputation, put out a quality product, get good buzz flowing (usually by providing awesome support) and they probably end up doing quite well.  Some established theme developers may say it’s “too late” to enter in the theme market.  I personally don’t believe that for one second, even though it may not be as easy to start up now as it was in the early days of commercial themes with all the noise.  Everyone has to start somewhere, and there’s always room for new, interesting, innovative, and quality new products.

Jungle Land - One of the most Popular Themes of ThemeLab

1WD:Each day, there are several WordPress theme releases in the community. What do you see in a “Quality” WordPress theme.

Leland:I see a quality WordPress theme as one with a clean design, with clean code running things behind the scenes.  It doesn’t necessarily need to have a boatload of theme options, a fancy magazine-style layout, or 50 social bookmarking icons built-in.  It just needs to work and let you focus your content, without getting in the way too much.  Themes that are slow loading, poorly coded, with subpar usability are themes that you should definitely stay away from, even if it may look flashy or “cool” on the front-end.

1WD:You are owner of Custom Theme, which offers custom theme development. What’s your day-to-day like?

Leland: I’ll be honest in that I haven’t really been getting many complete custom theme job requests lately.  Most of the work I’ve been doing lately has been mostly coding related.  Either coding mockups that people already have designed for them, or making “matching” WordPress themes so they can have a blog that blends in with the rest of their site.  There is a big market for this as people recognize the value a blog could add to an already established website.

1WD: How do you concentrate while writing code, and what is your favorite code editor?

Leland : First step, CLOSE TWEET DECK.  If I don’t, I find myself constantly checking it to see the latest updates.  And if I get a reply or a direct message and that little popup box appears, game over.  I’m Twitter addict too, in case you didn’t notice.  Closing Gmail also helps as well.  My favorite code editor would have to be Notepad++.  I don’t need any fancy features, just something a little more useful than just straight Notepad.

1WD: Any code pet peeves?

Leland: Let’s see, where do I start.  When I see “0px” instead of 0.  When CSS shorthand isn’t used properly (such as margin-top: 10px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; when you can say the same thing as margin: 10px;).  When I see a bunch of <br/> tags to create space, when you should be using padding or margins in CSS.  When I see a bunch of useless meta tags that noone cares about anymore loaded up in the header of a document, like “Last Updated” and “Revisit After”.  I’ll stop there, I think I have an idea for a future blog post.

1WD: What are your future plans?

Leland: I’m planning on keeping up producing free content on Theme Lab, as well as posting paid content as well in a new section called the “Underground.” There will be paid themes, tutorials, as well as a private forum for members.  It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while because I feel like I have a lot of WordPress coding knowledge to share.

Thanks for your time, Leland.

Feel free to share your thoughts with us. Do you think we should continue such interviews or any suggestions you want to give us. We are open for ideas. :)

About the Authors

The book is co-authored by Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks and Jeff Starr of Perishable Press. Both of them are famous in WordPress Community because of their out of the box solutions for developing websites using WordPress.

I will suggest you to check their blogs to guess the quality of content in book. The blogs mentioned before are filled completely with awesomeness.

What’s so Special in Book??

So you want to know what’s so special in this book. The authors of book wrote it in just two lines and we think that it is 100% Correct.

There is much to learn about the World’s most popular publishing platform. From your first steps of learning about WordPress all the way through maintaining a site throughout the years, this book is packed with truly practical information.

In short, the book will teach you how to create a WordPress theme from scratch. Starting from how to install WordPress securely, you will end the book learning clever tips and tricks for advanced WordPress theme development.

Why we liked the book?

There is no doubt that the whole book is filled with great content but the best thing we liked in the book is written below.

The PDF version of the book is awesome because we will be able to update and expand it indefinitely. As WordPress changes, the book will evolve with new information, techniques, and code. This is why we call the DiW PDF a “living, breathing document” – it will grow with WordPress, and will be updated and improved periodically well into the future.

Yes, you have got it right. The plan is to update this book as often as WordPress changes with new versions. When we first heard about this feature, we thought that It will be a little bit difficult as WordPress releases 3 Major versions in a single year. It’s not easy to update the book thrice a year, but the guys behind Digging into WordPress proved their selves by providing the version two just after 3 months of releasing the book to public. This means that the book will get an update after WordPress 3.0 so you will never feel that your techniques are old.

Two new chapters in DiW V2

It’s here, THE GIVEAWAY

We have 2 copies of DiW book for giveaway. We are thankful to the guys behind DIW for supporting this giveaway. Read on how to take part in giveaway.

How to enter in the giveaway?

Pretty simple, you have to leave a comment on the post and tell us what you want to see on 1stwebdesigner, or how we can make the website better. The comments should be constructive and powerful so that you can increase the chance of your win. We will select the best opinions and winners will be announced. The giveaway is open till 11:59pm GMT+5, May 11^th 2010.

Grab the book right now

If you don’t like waiting for the result of giveaway, you can buy the book here directly. What we can assure you that this book is definitely worth your money.

Feel free to let me know if you want us to review some specific book via comments section. Good Luck!

E-commerce week is sponsored by SSLmatic which sells SSL certificates for much cheaper prices (RapidSSL, Geotrust, Verisign) and offers great support. Check their site to get the cheap SSL certificates.

We can divide the whole section in three parts. First we will cover free and open source options and then we will cover pre hosted and paid options. We will also take a look on e-commerce modules available for extending your CMS to e-commerce website.

Open Source & Free E-Commerce Softwares

1. osCommerce

osCommerce is an award winning e-commerce shopping cart solution which has more than 200000 community members. osCommerce is released under GPL which means its open source and any one can modify its code adhering to the license under which it is released. You can download it for free and can create your shop online without paying a single penny to the developers of osCommerce.

The last update (3.0 Alpha 5) in osCommerce was in March 2009 so there are rumors that the project is dead. There are 5600 different modules available on their official repository which shows that community of osCommerce is really supportive.

2. Magento

Magento is the second big guy in the world of e-commerce solutions. Like osCommerce, Magento is also released under GPL and you can download it for free. With a very active development schedule, it got the latest update (1.4.1) on 19 February 2010. There is a big list of features which you can read there. But the biggest problem with Magento is that it’s heavy software and needs a huge amount of resources to work efficiently.

This is my personal choice and I use it for my client works. The community of Magento is still growing as it is new in the game. Recently the official extensions repository crossed the number of 2000 extensions. Varien, the company behind Magento also offers an enterprise version of Magento starting from only 8999$$$/year. The have previously worked with osCommerce and now they have developed their own solution.

3. Zen Cart

Zen Cart is a forked version of osCommerce, licensed under GPL and free for every one. The major difference between osCommerce and Zen Cart is the templating engine and some additional features which are not available in its superior. Templating engine of Zen cart makes it very easy to create custom themes for your online shop as compared to Magento and osCommerce. There are more than 1000 free addons available in their plugin repository.

4. PrestaShop

PrestaShop is also open source and free solution for creating your online store. It has a big community with more than 50000 community members. The best thing in PrestaShop is its light weight and fast speed. If you compare PrestaShop with Magento in terms of speed and size, it’s a lot better. One thing for sure, you will love its back end design. It’s really awesome, simple and easy to use. Even a beginner can set up an online store. We published a beginner’s guide for prestashop. You can check it out here.

Pre hosted and Paid Solutions

5. Shopify

Shopify is a pre hosted e-commerce solution which charges you for keeping your store online. You don’t need to set up anything technical. All you have to do is just adding your products. SSL, payment gateways and all the security measures are the responsibility of Shopify Team. You can setup your custom domain and you can also create custom themes.

Each shop owner can change the html/css of his store to customize the look of his store. All you have to do is just to pay their bills/month which depends upon your sales and the package plan you take. If you are totally scratch and want to make things easier for yourself then I will suggest you to go for it.

6. FoxyCart

FoxyCart is also a pre hosted version of e-commerce solutions but it’s a bit different from Shopify. Actually Foxy Cart is only a shopping cart (not a cms) which integrates in to your already existing website. You can customize the look of your shopping cart by changing the html and css of your shopping cart. Just take the code, put it into your website and you are done. At the end, you will have to pay them a monthly fee for all their efforts.

E-Commerce Modules for your CMS

7. Ubercart for Drupal

Ubercart is an e-commerce module for people who want to create an e-commerce store on the top of Drupal. It’s a fact that Ubercart is an almost complete solution for anyone who wants to create an e-commerce store but I will not recommend it those people who don’t have experience with Drupal.

8. WP e-Commerce for WordPress

WP e-Commerce is the most trusted and complete solution for people who want to include e-commerce functionality in their WordPress blog or website. We have already covered it out. You can check the detailed explanation here.

9. Virtue Mart for Joomla

Virtue Mart is an addon for creating online store using Joomla. There are 2 other plugins out there for same functionality but Virtue Mart is the oldest one and most comprehensive solution for creating e-commerce websites with Joomla. My personal opinion about Joomla is not good as I think a newbie will get puzzled with dozens of premium modules which have same functionally.

E-Commerce is an enormous subject to cover and each option has its own pros and cons. I have tried my best to write those options which are trusted ones and mostly people are happy with those options. There is always chance for improvement. Let me know if I have missed your favorite option and I will be happy to discuss it with you.:)

E-commerce week is sponsored by SSLmatic which sells SSL certificates for much cheaper prices (RapidSSL, Geotrust, Verisign) and offers great support. Besides standard SSL certificates, wildcard and EV certificates are offered with discounts too. Check their site to get the cheap SSL certificates.

E-commerce week is sponsored by SSLmatic which sells SSL certificates for much cheaper prices (RapidSSL, Geotrust, Verisign) and offers great support. Check their site to get the cheap SSL certificates.

Who should read this tutorial?

If you have not ever created an e-commerce website before, then this crash course is best-suited for you. I am considering that you are totally an idiot when it comes to e-commerce websites. At the end we will also talk about how a developer can integrate e-commerce features in his WordPress theme. So I will say this tutorial will take you from beginner level and at the end you can continue with creating e-commerce websites with WordPress as a developer.

What we will learn in this tutorial?

We will create a demo store using WP e-Commerce and WordPress. At the end there will be a discussion about how to develop e-commerce ready WordPress themes.

Our Main tool:  WP e-Commerce?

There are a lot of free and premium e-commerce plugins available to enhance WordPress for e-commerce functionality but we are going to use WP e-Commerce. The reasons why we have picked it out are pretty simple.

Why Use WP e-Commerce?

• Free and open source (You are free to modify its code and to share it with others).
• The Oldest one: Yes, WP e-Commerce is the first ever plugin created to deal with e-commerce in WordPress. So it has a lot of nice features which shows its maturity like many shipping solutions and so on.

• Free support forums and most importantly a very friendly support team.
• It offers template tags to integrate it in your WordPress theme and hence easy to design themes which have e-commerce functionalities in them.

• Premium Modules: If you don’t know how to code or have less time for finalizing a client project, you can always buy some premium modules of WP e-Commerce from their store to extend and enhance some features of your e-store.

Pro Tip: Setting up the development environment

It is always the best practice to set up WordPress on localhost as it fastens the process of development. After setting it up, you have no need to use any ftp program to upload files to servers. In short, hassle free development and it increases  productivity a lot. So this is highly recommended for you. If you are on windows or Linux you can use xampp. For mac lovers, I will suggest to use mamp. Follow these short and easy tutorials on how to setup local host on your own computer.

Resources:

1. Setting Up WordPress On Your PC/Linux Using XAMPP
2. Installing WordPress Locally on Your Mac With MAMP

Moreover I am using jQ, an awesome free theme for WordPress. How ever this tutorial should work fine with all bugs free themes.

Let’s do some real action. Fasten your seat belts as we are ready to start our development.

Installing the plugin

You can install WP e-Commerce from official plugins repository or from its official website. After activation, you will find a tab named Products below the comments tab. We will start from settings and then we will create some products to finally set up our demo store.

Settings WP e-Commerce>General

The first sub-tab under the settings tab is of general options. You can set your location, target markets and currency in which you will sell products. You can also set additional tax which will be applied on the top of your product price. For example in Pakistan, each business has to pay 15% of the total sales as general sales tax.

Settings WP e-Commerce>Presentation

The presentation tab is all about how you want to show your store. Instinct, the company behind WP e-Commerce also offers a gold cart with more options. You can say that it’s a premium version with more features so if you see some options disabled in settings, don’t worry. There is nothing wrong with your server permissions or installation method. You can only enable them after buying Gold Cart.

Most of the options in this tab are pretty self explanatory.  You can choose button types and choosing whether to show breadcrumbs, product ratings or not. Show Postage and Packaging means that you want to show the shipping charges on your product pages or not.

Product page settings allow you to customize the layout of product pages. You can select different layouts (only for gold cart) and different themes to show products. WP e-Commerce comes with three built-in themes. 3^rd option is what group of products you want to show on product pages. The concept of product groups is a bit complex and we will take a look on it later. For now, just take them as categories which help you in categorizing products in different ways as well as helping your customers in finding products easily and quickly.

Shopping cart settings allows you to choose where you want to show cart. You can select different options ranging from widgets to manual insertion of template tag. Sliding cart enables your customers to maximize and minimize the shopping cart using +/- buttons and the last option has been explained already.

Before going to next section of settings, it will be good if you learn what product groups are.

What are product groups?

You can take them as categories and tags built in with WordPress. Actually WP e-Commerce uses pages for all its needs and WordPress don’t allow you to categorize pages. That’s why the plugin comes with product groups. For example if you are creating a theme store (download goodies shop) you can make product groups of WordPress, tumblr, Drupal and Joomla while you can also categorize all the themes with respect of colors or some specific features. Hopefully you got the point. Just think that you can group product of same features with help of these product groups. I will try to make this concept clearer when we will create our product groups.

Let’s get back to Settings of our E-Store

While creating a product group you can give description and thumbnail of that group. In Product Group settings you can choose which parameters to show on product pages.

Thumbnails are pretty self explanatory. You can also choose pagination. If enabled, it will divide your products into different pages just like WordPress pagination. You can also choose whether to use IntenseDebate or not.

Settings WP e-Commerce>Admin

Here you can setup your digital goodies store. You can set how much time a user can download a specific file. You can also lock downloads to that specific ip from which orders has been placed. You can also set default email addresses for sending different notifications to customer and for your own record.

You can also write custom messages here which will be sent out to your customers on different events and also to the admin of e-store. At the end of this setting page you can give link to different pages. You will have to set page links after changing permalink structure.

Settings WP e-Commerce>Shipping

You can setup all the shipping options here. You can choose different shipping schemes like flat rate and weight rate. The plugin will automatically calculate the shipping charges and will add these charges on top of your product price. WP e-Commerce has built in support for ShipWire which is an order fulfillment company for online vendors. You can create some kind of conditions/layers. For example you can set rate if product’s weight is greater than 4 pounds. Remember you don’t need these options if you are going to set up a digital products store.

Settings WP e-Commerce>Payments Options

The most important part of an e-commerce store is payment gateways. WP e-commerce comes bundled with 2 Payment Gateways, paypal and google checkout. You can also select Manual Payment/Test Gateway if you want to receive payments using money orders or online transactions to your bank account.

Using import tab you can import data of your previously made products from a csv file.

Settings WP e-Commerce>Checkout

This is last step in setting up WP e-Commerce is setting up the checkout form. You can implement the restriction of registration before checking out. Remember that it will only work if you will check “Any one can register” box in WordPress general website settings.

So we are done with our settings. Let’s create some product groups and products so that we can have a functional e-store.

Creating Product Groups and Categories

We are going to create a t-shirt store from where people can buy t-shirts. So we are getting into t-shirt business.:) Just think how you can group t-shirts? You can group them by size, by brand, by color and also by sex. Then we can have sub groups under these parameters to organize things more professionally. I have come up with following groups to set up demo store.

T-Shirts

• Color
  • Black
  • Blue
• Brand
  • Nike
  • Adidas

Let’s start adding them. Go to Products>Categories. First of all add a new group there and after that you can create categories in it. This is as simple as creating categories for WordPress. Take products as categories and “categories” as sub-categories.

After this step you will be able to select t-shirts from drop down menu. Select then edit it and add sub-categories to it.

The concept of adding categories can confuse you a bit. Best way to understand it to play with it as long as you become a master. Don’t forget to delete two dummy categories “brands” and “categories”. This is what I have after adding all the categories.

So we are done with categories. Let’s move towards products.

Creating your first Product with WordPress and WP e-Commerce

Go to Products>Products. You can add new products here. You will see a WYSIWYG editor just like WordPress post editor where you can fill all the details. Some things which are important to define are given below

SKU: is abbreviation of Stock Keeping Unit. It’s a general term used in our everyday life. In store it is an identifier of specific product just like each post in WordPress has unique id. I am showing you process of adding one t-shirt. You can add others products with some method.

You can also choose inventory to keep track of your store. Moreover you will have to upload product image here. After adding two products, this is how my product dashboard looks like.

After finalizing products, its time to add widgets to your WordPress theme. Go to Appearance> Widgets. Add shopping cart widget and product groups widget to sidebar. It will give an awesome look to your e-store.

You can now see how our store looks like.

Single Product Page

You can also use products page as home page by going to WordPress reading settings if you don’t want a blog at all. Another tip is to utilize wp-hide-post for hiding some pages so that no one can access shopping cart page and order pages directly.

Short Codes:

You can use short codes for showing specific products and product groups inside posts and pages. You can get a short code by editing the category. Just see the following screenshot for better understanding.  Same is the case for products.

Integrating WP e-Commerce in your WordPress theme

Another great feature of WP e-Commerce is its template tags which make the job of integrating e-Commerce functionalities in a WordPress theme very easier.

You can use following template tags to include different functionalities in your WordPress theme.

<?php echo nzshpcrt_shopping_basket(); ?>// Show Shopping Carts
<?php nzshpcrt_latest_product(); ?>// Show Display Latest Products
<?php show_cats_brands(); ?>// Show all Categories
<?php echo wpsc_buy_now_button(1); ?>//Show Buy Now Button
<?php echo wpsc_add_to_cart_button(1); ?>// Display Add to Cart Button

Extending WP e-Commerce

Because of its reputation, there are lots of premium and community plugins available to extend the functionality of WordPress. You can take a look on this page for the plugins and themes available to extend WP e-Commerce.

I am sure that you enjoyed this crash course in building e-commerce websites with WordPress. Feel free to leave your questions and thoughts about the article.

E-commerce week is sponsored by SSLmatic which sells SSL certificates for much cheaper prices (RapidSSL, Geotrust, Verisign) and offers great support. Besides standard SSL certificates, wildcard and EV certificates are offered with discounts too. Check their site to get the cheap SSL certificates.

In 1^st E-Commerce Week, we will publish 5 articles focused on building e-commerce websites. Below are the titles and short intros of the articles:

Tuesday: A Crash Course in Creating E-Commerce Websites with WordPress

In the 1^st article of 1^st E-Commerce week, we will learn how to create a website which has online store’s functionalities in it using the awesome publishing platform, WordPress. In simple words we will create a fully functional electronic store. There will be also a discussion on how to build e-commerce ready WordPress themes from a developer’s point of view.

Wednesday: A Beginner’s Guide to PrestaShop – The Open-Source e-Commerce CMS

In this 2nd article of 1^st E-Commerce week, we will introduce you the key-features of PrestaShop, one of the most used open-source e-Commerce shopping-cart solutions out there, which is free to use and with a big community of almost 50000 community members.

Thursday: Choosing Right Modules For Your E-Commerce Type Website

In this 3^rd article of 1^st E-Commerce week, we will discuss different e-commerce solutions available for building e-commerce websites. We will talk about open source shopping cart solutions, the paid ones and e-commerce modules for famous open source CMS like Drupal and Joomla.

Friday: Excellent Shopping Cart Designs: Showcase and Best Practices

In the 4^th and second last article of 1^st E-Commerce week, we will do an extensive review of 35 shopping cart designs and the best Practices for Shopping Cart Optimization. We will take a look on shopping cart designs of famous e-stores.

Saturday: 35 Insanely Cool Magento Themes for your Online Store

In the last article of 1^st E-Commerce Week, we will showcase 35 insanely cool free and premium Magento themes which you should give a try for sure.

Sponsors of E-Commerce Week

E-commerce week is sponsored by SSLmatic which sells SSL certificates for much cheaper prices (RapidSSL, Geotrust, Verisign) and offers great support. Besides standard SSL certificates, wildcard and EV certificates are offered with discounts too. Check their site to get the cheap SSL certificates.

Don’t forget to give your feedback via comments section or tweet us @1stwebdesigner.

1. ScribeFire

To do Blogging, you need a Blog Editor and ScribeFire in Firefox acts as a nice blogging editor. The user can drag and drop text from web pages, insert images, and post to multiple blogs. Unfortunately, there is a tracking option enabled by default but it can be disabled. This addon can actually make your blog editing platform independent from your operating system.

2. Reminder Fox

Obviously, Bloggers need to sort out their future plans to groom quickly. Reminder Fox lets you do it with ease in Mozilla Firefox. You can manage To Do lists, set Reminders with alerts or alarms right in your Firefox browser conveniently.

3. RSS Ticker

Bloggers need to remain updated with other blogs and sources of information for which the defacto communication standard is RSS. RSS Ticker is a nice add-on which displays the Live Bookmarks in a scrolling fashion across the user’s screen. It means that the user gets updates while browsing and doesn’t need to log in feed reader specifically for accessing RSS feeds.

4. Faster Fox

This addon increases overall productivity of blogger by providing some commonly used tasks in a refined manner. It tweaks wikipedia by showing related articles, auto loads next pages, shows suggestions by Google for a keyword in address bar, enhances Google’s search results and many more. Its my personal favorite and highly recommended for you.

5. Similar Web

If you are facing difficulty in finding a related website to the one you are currently visiting, Similar Web can actually provide many alternatives. In this way, the blogger can easily hit upon many similar resources and refine articles comfortably. It helps a lot and boosts my productivity while researching for an article.

6. Zemanta

You are wondering for addon like “Similar Web” which can find relative content for your blog post then you don’t need to worry, Zemanta is here. It’s a content recommendation engine which helps you in finding and suggesting images, links, articles, and tags correlated to your content from a large number of quality resources like YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Amazon, Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter, and many more. An awesome addon which you should install right now.

7. Readability

Having some difficulty in reading text surrounded by redundant information on a web page. Readability addon will rip off the unnecessary information to make content more visible. In this way, the web pages can be printed with less clutter. This addon also provides auto scrolling feature which can give rest to your fingers and scroll a web page without keyboard and mouse.

8. Gmail Manager

Gmail is currently the mostly used email service in general and this happens to be same in case of bloggers. Also Google provides free email solution in a package named Google Apps for domains. Therefore, an enhanced Gmail notifier is needed and Gmail Manager addon is best for many purposes.

9. Brief

It is another Firefox addon which acts as an alternative for a feed reader. Its features are not less worth than a full feed reader. The feeds are displayed in form of a full web page with a sidebar containing user’s subscriptions. The items can be searched and bookmarked. There is also a notification option which informs whenever there is an update in any feed.

10. Read It Later

If your bookmarks are getting messy with links which you intend to read only once then you should use this extension. The web pages can be marked with single click for latter reading. The items can read offline and it is also possible to synchronize them between multiple devices and workplaces.

11. Copy Plain Text

Bloggers need to copy content from different sources and paste it in their article but in most cases the content has its own formatting. You need to remove this formatting and then match it with your content. Instead of doing this, you can copy text from a web page through this extension which removes all formatting and makes it simple text.

12. US English Dictionary

Nonnative as well native English speakers need a dictionary for easy look up. For a Blogger, it is even more necessary as it can provide more sophisticated alternatives for a given word which can polish Blogger’s write up.

13. Scrapbook Plus

This Firefox addon lets a blogger organize a library of web pages or full websites. The addon supports filters which can be defined to exclude related links and web pages that are not required.

If you are a Blogger and starts utilizing these addons, you will quickly feel an improvement in quality of your work which is obviously the ultimate goal. There may be an addon missing which is your favorite one, do let us know in comments.

Recently we came to a book named PHP for Absolute Beginners which is a must read for beginners. Today we are going to review the book and guess what? We have 2 free copies of book to give you free of cost. I wish that it would have been there when I was learning PHP. Anyways After buying the book, I read it and the book was something more than awesome.

About the Author

The book is written by Jason Lengstorf who is a self taught PHP developer. He is an experienced voice in PHP and web development. If you are a regular reader of some famous blogs like Smashing Magazine and CSS-Tricks then you might came to tutorials written by him. He is also co-author of the famous CSS-Tricks series “Creating a web app from scratch”. You can read his extensive interview by me here.

Inside the Book

Jason starts the book with how to install PHP on your computer and then leads you throughout the way to building up your own blog system with user comments. Rather than wasting the first chapter on the history of programming and PHP, how it came and other theoretical stuff, he tells the readers how to install xampp on your local computer for better development. I have read about 5-6 books on PHP and it was my habit to skip the first chapter of book, first time I read the starting chapter of book.

Why we liked the book?

The book is an example of a phrase, less theory, more coding. Jason teaches PHP with a lot of sample tutorials and examples. You will not read chapters and chapters of theory but you will learn best practices to do in the coding, and many pro tips which should be kept in mind when coding in PHP.

The Giveaway

We have got two copies of PHP for absolute beginners for the giveaway. We are very thankful to Jason Lengstorf and the publishers of book APRESS Publishers for supporting this giveaway.

How to enter in the giveaway?

Pretty simple, you have to leave a comment on the post and tell us what you want to see on 1stwebdesigner, or how we can make the website better. We will use random.org to pick the winners. The giveaway is open till 11:59pm GMT+5, February 18^th 2010.

Grab the book right now

If you don’t like waiting for the result of giveaway, you can buy the book here through Amazon.com service. What we can assure you that this book is definitely worth your money.

Good Luck!

*Update by Dainis Graveris

Seeing all those amazing suggestions and comments changed my mind about randomized pick! We will choose winners with the most thoughtful, interesting and best answer! I just love to see how you drop down all the weak points of 1stwebdesigner site! I love you for that, and I am definitely thinking about new design, which will be very well researched and carefully put together to fix all problems, usability bugs we have here!

Give us more feedback! Completely inspired!

Update

The Giveaway is closed now.

Winners are Terri Lockerridge and Mark Anderson.

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions.