Templates for e-commerce

WordPress native ability to manage themes and templates to design and look of your store.

TheCartPress E-Commerce takes advance of WordPress 3.0 custom post-types. See WordPress Template Hierarchy to understand WordPress hierarchy and how it works.

TheCartPress is 100% integrated with WordPress and it extends the WordPress template hierarchy

Theme compatibility

By default and basically you can use TheCartPress E-commerce with any WordPress theme but perhaps you need some extra work to show nicely your store, because an e-commerce should be different than a blog.

TheCartPress E-commerce plugin is able to run nicely  in mayor WordPress themes.  Even if your theme does not have templates for e-commerce.

But the most powerful and flexible way is using templates and TheCartpress ‘Template tags’ in your themes.

To customize and uplevel your store  you can start creating a single thecartpress template:

  • thecartpress.php

Then all your eCommerce pages will be loaded in thecartpress.php

You can create thecartpress.php from your page.php. Duplicate page.php and rename it to thecartpress.php.
Customize thecartpress to suit your store needs. (delete blog meta tags, etc).

TheCartPress template hierarchy

If you need a deeper integration or customization take a look at  hierarchy of TheCartpress templates.

TheCartPress Template Functions

TheCartPress defines many useful PHP functions, known as Template Tags, for use especially in WordPress Themes.

The Template Tag page lists most of those useful functions.

The Loop from your theme

For example to call loop-tcp-grid.php:


 <!--?php /* Run the loop for the category product page to output the products.  * If you want to overload this in a child theme then include a file  * called loop-products-grid.php and that will be used instead.  */
get_template_part( 'loop','tcp-grid'); ?-->

Call TheCartPress loops from your templates, widgets and shortcode settings. The name of the template loop must start with ‘loop-‘ to works with TheCartPress Loop Widgets and Shortcodes. For example a valid name: loop-myloop.php

Templates in child theme have priority over parent templates.

CUSTOMIZE YOUR Grid / List LOOP

Of course you can also use your custom loops from your theme. The template loops name in your theme must begin with “loop-” eg: “loop-products-grid.php”.

As base to customize the loop you can use /wp-content/plugins/thecartpress/themes-templates/loop-tcp-grid.php.

  • Copy “loop-tcp-grid.php” from /wp-content/plugins/thecartpress/themes-templates and paste in your theme.

Loop Flexibility

Configuring the TheCartPress settings and configuring each widget and shortcode you can define the numbers of colums for the grid by device and show or hide the different items inside the loop.

Of course you can use non configurable loops (standar WordPress loops), but you lost the advanced settings.

Widgetize your templates and play with the widgets and templates to create profesional and personal stores.