Some Questions and Answers

Thursday, May 28th, 2009 | Posted in: General

This morning, like every morning, I checked my email and among some support requests I had the following:

Hi I have a few questions about the “folioShop – folioBlog” theme. Is the theme built on your own shopping cart code or is it based other plugins? How does it compare to something like the WP e-Commerce plugin http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/ ? Do you provide updates for your themes when new versions of wordpress come out? Thanks Tom

I’ve started writting a reply but then I thought: "Wouldn’t this be a good opportunity to write something on my new blog and at the same time benefit others that may be having the same thoughts/questions running through their heads?"

So here I am, writting this post instead.
Tom, hope you don’t mind your answer arriving this way.

Lets take a question at a time.

Is the theme built on your own shopping cart code or is it based on other plugins?

All our ecommerce themes are based on our own code. We wanted to develop our own solution so no, we do not use any plugins.

How does it compare to something like the WP e-Commerce plugin http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/ ?

This is not an easy question to answer as we are too close to this project to give an unbiased yet objective opinion. I’m not going to say which solution is better than the other simply because it really depends on what you are looking for and which solution better fits your needs.

Although I cannot speak for either the wp e-Commerce plugin nor for any other e-commerce plugin out there what I can talk about is our code.

We started in December 2008 and I must say, considering there’s only 2 people working on it, we’ve covered quite some ground since the first theme’s (wpShop) initial release.

Our solution is simply a different approach.
Note: The "issues" bellow are not necessary problems or disadvantages of any WordPress e-commerce solution that may be using or be based on what we considered as "issues"

The issues?

1. Too many plugins slow down our websites. A slow loading website makes end users wait longer. If potential customers must wait too long for a page to load they won’t stay, they leave. Less visitors = less sales = less profit = not the reason why you decided to open up an eShop.
2. E-commerce solutions not taking advantage of WordPress’ post and pages
3. Not always having a theme to go with the plugin.

Solution?

1. Move the shopping cart code away from a plugin driven solution and inside the theme. Well, in a folder within the theme, but still part of the theme.
2. Use Wordpress’ excellent core abilities and functions from creating and categorizing content to archiving and searching existing content. In other words treat shop products as posts.
3. Develop a theme around it

The advantage?

1. One less plugin to install = more room for other essential plugins.
2. Products can be created, categorized, archived, searched for, etc.. basically do with them what you can do with normal posts.
3. E-commerce solution that comes with a theme taylored to fit.

Is our e-commerce solution perfect? No, and we do not claim it is.
We have big improvements planned and many are on the way. We respect and value our customers and we are seriously commited in always working and improving our code. We use it ourselves (this website for example is based on the folioShop theme) – what better way to find out how things can be done better!

…and finally,

Do you provide updates for your themes when new versions of wordpress come out?

This is another advantage, I believe, of not depending on a plugin for your shop’s functionality. The danger of the code not working as it should when a new version of WordPress is out is greatly minimized.
Why?
Our shopping cart code uses a minimum of WordPress native functions and the ones we do use have a backward compatibility policy.
According to what I read about 2.8 so far, all of our themes should still work just fine.
That said however, we will anyway make sure that our themes use the latest WordPress version so when 2.8 is out we will go through the themes one at a time and upgrade them all if necessary.

I hope this post has provided some satisfying answers to your concerns Tom and to anyone else that may have had similar questions.
Over to you. Tell us what you think.