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So, you're already familiar with WordPress and know how to use plugins, widgets, and themes? Your next step is to expand your existing WordPress website or blog with an online store? In that case you've come to the right place!
WooCommerce is a versatile plugin for WordPress, that gives the possibility for everyone with a little WordPress knowledge to start their own online store.
In case you are not familiar with WordPress at all, this book is not the first one you should read. No worries though, WordPress isn't that hard to learn and there are tons of online possibilities to learn about the WordPress solution very quickly. Or just turn to one of the many printed books on WordPress that are available.
These are the topics we'll be covering in this article:
Before we start, remember that it's only possible to install your own plugins if you're working in your own WordPress installation. This means that users running a website on WordPress.com will not be able to follow along. It's simply impossible in that environment to install plugins yourself.
Although installing WooCommerce on top of WordPress isn't difficult, we highly recommend that you set up a test environment first. Without going too much into depth, this is what you need to do:
Are these short instructions just too much for you at this moment? Do you need a more detailed step-by-step guide to create a test environment for your WordPress website? Look at the following tutorials:
For Max OSX users: http://wpmu.org/local-wordpresstest-environment-mamp-osx/
For Windows users: http://www.thegeekscope.com/howto-copy-a-live-wordpress-website-to-local-indowsenvironment/
More tutorials will also be available on our website: http://www.joomblocks.com
Don't forget to sign up for the free Newsletter, that will bring you even more news and tutorials on WordPress, WooCommerce, and other open source software solutions!
Once ready, we'll be able to take the next step and install the WooCommerce plugin. Let's take a look at our WordPress backend. In our situation we can open this by browsing to http://localhost/wp36/wp-admin. Depending on the choices you made previously for your test environment, your URL could be different.
Well, this should all be pretty familiar for you already. Again, your situation might look different, depending on your theme or the number of plugins already active for your website.
Installing a plugin is a fairly simple task:
In our example project, we're installing the English version of WooCommerce. But you might need a different language. By default, WooCommerce is already delivered in a number of languages. This means the installation will automatically follow the language of your WordPress installation. If you need something else, just browse through the plugin directory on WordPress.org to find any additional translations.
Note that if you open a page that was automatically created by WooCommerce, you'll only see a shortcode, which is used to call the needed functionality. Do not delete the shortcodes, or WooCommerce might stop working. However, it's still possible to add your own content before or after the shortcode on these pages.
WooCommerce also added some widgets to your WordPress dashboard, giving an overview of the latest product and sales statistics. At this moment this is all still empty of course.
In this article, we learned about the basics of WooCommerce and installing the same. We also learned that WooCommerce is a free but versatile plugin for WordPress, that you may use to easily set up your own online store.
Further resources on this subject: