The WP e-Commerce plugin by Instinct Entertainment

This is a good little plugin for someone that wants to sell
online but doesn’t have an absolutely huge stock of goods
for sale.

The plugin and installation instructions are here:
WP e-Commerce plugin

However according to Instinct Entertainment’s
page on it:

WP e-Commerce powers over 50,000 websites!

The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an industrial strength elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind. Perfect for:

» Digital Downloads!
» Bands & Record Labels
» Clothing Companies
» Crafters & Artists
» Books, DVDs & MP3 files
» Members Only / Subscription sites
» Stores with over 10,000 + products

I don’t plan on trying 10,000 + items though. lol

It was a fairly easy little thing to get installed using their
instructions which are fairly straightforward in nature.

Setting it up is about as easy too; though there were a few
little stumbling blocks here and there…

Two come to mind…

1) The plugin is particularly picky about your image file
extensions. When helping a friend install his we discovered
that none of our JPG’s were working and after a bit of digging
on their support forums we found the key to the problem.
The extensions have to be lower case.
Example: Image.JPG won’t work however Image.jpg will.
Why? I honestly don’t know.

2) Setting up the Paypal payment gateway doesn’t seem
to require the exact instructions they offer.

From Instinct Entertainment:

WP e-Commerce lite install instruction link

PayPal Setup
These are the instructions for setting up PayPal for your WP e-Commerce store

At PayPal site

1. Browse to PayPal and sign up using your email address

2. Under Profile > Shipping Settings check the allow transaction-based shipping values to override the profile shipping settings listed above

3. Done

At your WP e-Commerce store’s Admin

Now that you have a PayPal account setup enter the email address you used into the payment gateway settings page in the WP e-commerce admin panel

1. Under e-Commerce > Gateway Options choose PayPal as your payment gateway.

2. In “PayPay Username” enter your email address that you use to login to your PayPal account.

3. In “PayPal URL” enter https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr

4. Click the button that says “Submit”

Conclusion

Now that you have setup your shop and have a working PayPal account you are ready to start selling! Upload your products and have fun.

Their directions for Paypal don’t seem to apply really. I checked
my Paypal account and could find no way to set up the shipping
per their instructions. However, when I did a test, it did take
me to Paypal and it did show that I owed $ 0.01 to myself. lol

All in all, I’d say it is am excellent solution for someone that
want sell online but doesn’t want to fool with one of the full
blown shopping carts like Zen Cart or Candy Press.

Installing Wordpress

Installing Wordpress

There are two ways it can generally be installed. The easiest
way being to use a “one click” installer such as Fanastico. You
may however need to manually install it if your host doesn’t
offer an installer or if it is down for maintenance.

This Wordpress blog was manually installed and the longest
part of it was uploading the files to the host. Their included
instructions are in a file named readme.html and they are very
straightforward in nature.

I will give you the simplest version of installing it manually.

1) Make folder on your computer named wordpress so you may
more easily find it.

2) Download the current version of Wordpress from their
site into that folder.

3) Unzip the the zip file into you wordpress folder, it will
make it’s own sub folders for it’s files.

4) Create a MySQL database. You can use whatever name
for it you want but the easiest would simply be wordpress.

4a) Depending on your host you may have to create a password
for the MySQL database. Many host use a default password
though, usually the same one you were given when you bought
your hosting package.

5) Look for a file in your wordpress folder named:
wp-config-sample.php open this file using a text editor such
as Notepad. (Don’t use Wordpad, it will mess the file up.)

After you open it you see that it has places clearly marked
for the information, all you have to do is paste your information
over their’s.

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

// You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique prefix
$table_prefix = 'wp_'; // Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!

// Change this to localize WordPress. A corresponding MO file for the
// chosen language must be installed to wp-content/languages.
// For example, install de.mo to wp-content/languages and set WPLANG to 'de'
// to enable German language support.
define ('WPLANG', '');

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

define('ABSPATH', dirname(__FILE__).'/');
require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-settings.php');
?>

6) Save the file as wp-config.php and upload it with the rest
of the files to what ever folder you want to put the blog into.

7) Open www.yoursite.com/yourblogfolder/wp-admin/install.php
in your browser. After this is all pretty much downhill. Wordpress
will give you the username admin and generate a password
that you can change later.

And that’s it.