I reviewed a WordPress cart plugin last January ideal for artists/photographers to easily connect a shop to Nextgen Galleries. Since then I’ve worked with the Shopp plugin which does what it says, but the website and documentation is a trial and I’ve never been totally satisfied with it.

Recently a new project needed a WordPress shop so I did a random sweep of cart reviews, concentrating more on the comment’s section than the actual post content. Somewhat depressingly ‘bug’ seemed to crop up often until I found one called The Cart Press which turned out to be a highly customisable plugin with catalogue, shopping cart, user accounts and checkout payments with paypal and authorise.net.

I set up a test site locally and spent a morning on it. In all honesty at one point I almost gave up as there seemed no conclusive guide to customising the shop pages – I pretty much ended up searching the support forums and connecting the dots. Perhaps I’m being unfair on that point – if I had taken the sensible route of going through all the documentation it might have been an easier set up. But from my point of view I needed to find out quickly if it was a fit for the project. Anyway, I’m very glad I stuck with it.

To control the content on the shop pages this is what I had to do:

• copy loop-tcp-grid.php and taxonomy-tcp.php from the themes-templates folder in the thecartpress plugin into my theme folder
• rename taxonomy-tcp.php to taxonomy-tcp_product_category.php, change divs to match my theme, change sidebar to sidebar2 to have different widgets in the shop and blog, add breadcrumbs
• create archive-tcp_product.php, change sidebar, add breadcrumbs
• create single-tcp_product.php, change sidebar, add breadcrumbs, add fblike, tweet, +1

For breadcrumbs on the shop pages I used the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin. That way I could use the breadcrumb function that comes with the excellent Yoast SEO plugin for all the blog pages.

Then I went into the backend, clicked on thecartpress ‘settings’ tab, clicked ‘theme compatability’ selected ‘use configurable TCP loops’ and decided which checkboxes to tick.

Then I clicked on ‘loop settings’ (which is directly below the ‘settings’ tab) and again decided which checkboxes to tick.

The rest of the setup is pretty self-explanatory but it’s worth exploring every tab and sub-tab to see the options available.

The one thing that is missing is a product search function but that apparently is in the works. In the meantime they recommend using the Search Everything plugin.

In conclusion, The Cart Press is a good free cart plugin that I would highly recommend. Sensei, the author, is quick to respond in the support forums and incorporates suggestions into future releases. Just one word of warning, I had a problem with IE9 and IE8 locally in the checkout stage. That problem has never been resolved but when I switched to a live server all was OK. It might just be an issue with Xampp.