Why Product Order Matters in WooCommerce

It probably goes without saying that the order in which products are displayed is extremely important, largely because it makes it quicker and easier for customers to find the things they actually want.

The organization of products also helps with positioning products strategically, so that customers can see them easily when just browsing. This will help potential customers to stay engaged, rather than feeling overwhelmed, which leads to a better user experience and ultimately, more sales.

WooCommerce does have a few default sorting options, however, there are many limitations with both flexibility and control, as detailed below.

What is visual merchandising in eCommerce and why does it matter?

Traditionally, visual merchandising is the process of creating engaging and aesthetically pleasing in-store displays to attract customers, highlight products and drive sales. It involves strategic placement, lighting, color schemes, signage etc. to enhance the shopping experience and guide the flow of the customer’s journey.

In eCommerce, these same principles apply, just in a digital space. Instead of physical displays, webstores use things such as intuitive layouts as well as strategic placements, such as featured products and curated collections. All of these things, and more, serve as the digital equivalent of eye-catching displays, ensuring a seamless and visually appealing shopping experience.

How to Re-arrange Products in WooCommerce (Classic Default Options)

There are three default ways to rearrange products in WooCommerce:

Option 1 – Using Drag-and-drop:

Once on the WordPress dashboard, navigate to Products > All Products > Sorting. Here, a list of all products will become available. You can then simply hover over the specific product, drag it and then drop it to wherever is required.

Option 2 – Sorting by Product Attributes (Price, Date, Popularity, etc.):

Once in the WordPress dashboard, navigate to Appearance > Customize. Once here, select Product Catalogue and then search for ‘Default Product Sorting’. Decide which sorting option you would like to use and select it. Then click ‘Publish’ to complete the process.

Option 3 – Setting a Menu Order for Individual Products:

Once on the WordPress dashboard, navigate to Products > All Products. Hover over the product you wish to order and click on ‘Edit’. Next, navigate to the products Data Section and select the ‘Advanced’ tab. Here, you’ll see a dropdown labelled ‘Menu Order’.

Using this field you then assign each product with a number, of which the lowest will appear the highest in the menu. If you have two or more products that share a number, they will then be arranged alphabetically.

How to Re-arrange Products in WooCommerce (non-FSE Default Options)

If your store is running on a block-based theme using the Full Site Editor (FSE), you won’t see the old Appearance → Customize → Product Catalog menu. Instead:

Go to Appearance → Editor → Templates → Product Archive (or Shop Page).

Select the Products (Beta) block or Collections block.

Under Settings, you’ll see the same sorting options (by price, date, popularity, etc.) that used to live in the Customizer.

The other two methods — drag-and-drop sorting under Products → All Products → Sorting and setting a menu order for individual products — still work the same way.

The main difference with FSE is simply where you configure the defaults.

What are the Limitations of WooCommerce’s Default Sorting Options?

Unfortunately, there are many limitations with all three options of WooCommerce’s default sorting:

• Lack of Control: You cannot fully customize how products are displayed beyond WooCommerce’s default sorting rules.
• No Category-Specific Sorting: Sorting applies to the whole store, rather than being category or tag-specific.
• Manual Sorting is Tedious and Time-Consuming: Dragging and dropping large product inventories is inefficient and takes a huge amount of time to do.
• No Easy Way to Promote Featured or Seasonal Products: There is also no built-in method to highlight things such as limited time offers, or best-selling products at the top of categories.
• Limited Impact on SEO: Default sorting doesn’t allow optimization based on top-performing products, which can potentially affect search rankings.

Examples of when WooCommerce’s Default Sorting Options won’t work so well:

Example 1: If you would like seasonal products to appear higher in a seasonal category, pushing them up the ranking might make them appear on page 1, which is great around the holiday period, but not so great in July! Implementing this work can be difficult and tedious, which will then require to be undone only a few months later.

Example 2: If you would like a certain product to be in the first position on a sub-category page, but not on the main category page, for example, you might want ‘Black Decking Paint’ to be at the very top under a sub-category for ‘Decking Paint’, but don’t want it in the first position under the main category page of ‘Exterior Wood Protection’.

Example 3: If you have new products you wish to push to a top position, but have a huge product catalogue consisting of hundreds of other items to click and drag through, moving them around could take a very long time – not only that, but you will also have no way of easily seeing where the pagination occurs, resulting in a little bit of guesswork.

How the WooCommerce Product Sorting & Re-Ordering Plugin Solves These Issues

The use of a custom sorting plugin can enhance store organisation and improve conversions:

Drag-and-Drop Sorting Made Easier: A far more intuitive drag-and-drop interface that’s much easier to manage, even for large stores.

Custom Sorting Per Category, Brand or Tag: Set unique sorting orders for specific categories, brands or tags, rather than applying the same blanket rule storewide.

Prioritise Best-Sellers & Seasonal Promotions: Quickly and easily reorder products for special sales, big deals such as Black Friday, or to promote the arrival of new items.

Faster Bulk Sorting: Save admin time and hassle, by sorting multiple products efficiently, instead of dragging them one by one.

Easily See Where Pagination Occurs: See exactly where pagination falls, allowing you to strategically place products that might otherwise get pushed on to the following page.

SEO & Conversion Benefits: Highlighting the best-performing product/s first can increase click-through rates and help improve rankings.

WooCommerce Default Sorting vs. Product Sorting & Re-Ordering Plugin: A Comparison

Feature	Default WooCommerce	Product Sorting & Re-Ordering Plugin
Manual Drag-and-Drop Sorting		(Plus more intuitive interface)
Sorting by Price, Date, Popularity		(Plus category-specific sorting)
Category-Specific Product Order
Bulk Sorting for Large Stores
Featured & Promotional Product Prioritization
Good for SEO & Conversion Optimization

How to Get Started with the Plugin

The Product Sorting & Re-Ordering Plugin is simple and easy to set up with no developer input needed. You can simply add the plugin and begin visually merchandising your store right away.

How to Install The Plugin

• Once you have purchased the plugin from WooCommerce.com:
• Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
• Go to the Plugins menu.
• Click ‘Add New’ and then select ‘Upload Plugin’.
• Upload the plugin file you downloaded (it will be called product-sorting-reordering-for-woocommerce.zip).
• Finally, click ‘Install’ and then ‘Activate’ the plugin.

For further information on the plugin, please see the documentation sheet available on WooCommerce.com.

Conclusion: Take Full Control of Your WooCommerce Product Sorting

Using a plugin that quickly and efficiently reorders and organises products within WooCommerce offers several key benefits over the default versions currently available. It enhances user experience, by allowing customers to find products quickly and easily, which ultimately leads to increased sales and conversions.

The advanced sorting options, such as drag-and-drop reordering, category, brand or tag-based organisation, the ability to prioritise products and see where pagination will occur, provides greater flexibility and control over product displays. Additionally, it saves store owners time by streamlining product management, reducing the manual effort required to keep listings well structured.

Wonderful plugin I recently installed. No issues or conflicts, worked fantastic. I easily sorted my products by category in the order I chose rather than the default WooCommerce setting. Would definitely recommend for someone looking to quickly and efficiently sort there products by dragging and drop option.

– Larry

In summary, this plugin enhances both store functionality and customer satisfaction.

The post How to Sort and Re-arrange Products in WooCommerce appeared first on HappyKite.

As a small but growing digital agency we’re always learning and doing our best to make sure we’ve got a happy team and happy clients. Last week was Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK and we took the opportunity to do a few fun things, chat more openly and bust some of the myths around mental health. It’s a truly important topic, even more so in an industry like ours where staff often work remotely.

HappyKite Happy Mind Lucky Dip!

We had a team lucky dip, everyone got two prizes throughout the week – some were silly things to make people smile, others were vouchers for things like extended lunch breaks to go for a walk or to read a book. Jenny hit the jackpot and won a bonus day off work – which does come with homework, she has to spend some time on a hobby, go outside and send the rest of us photos of what she got up to that day instead – and she has to avoid screens as much as possible!

The Whiteboard of Myths!

Adelaide channeled her early career as a primary school teacher and produced a display with common mental health myths on it, for instance did you know that if you use a mental health service, statistically there’s a one in three chance that you’ll lose contact with friends as a result. There is still such a stigma around mental health issues that people often don’t know how to help or feel uncomfortable so lose contact. As we learnt from the display, you don’t need to be a mental health expert to be a good friend, small things like phone calls or messages can make a significant difference.

Pets in the Office

We’re fortunate that Basepoint is a pet friendly building and sometimes will have pets in the office, but this week we made a point of having the dogs in. Just stroking, sitting next to or playing with a pet can really help to relax and calm anyone. A significant and growing number of studies have shown that pets, in particular cats and dogs, can help with numerous issues linked to mental health from depression and PTSD to addictions, stress and general feelings of loneliness.

On Wednesday we had Ollie the Miniature Schnauzer-Cross and on Friday we had Tori the Border Collie, both were excellently behaved and forced us all to take breaks and step away from our screens to play with them. They’re both welcome back any time!

Mental Health Quiz

Throughout the week, we had an ongoing quiz on on our team Slack channel where we were asked a variety of mental health questions with multiple choice answers, we voted on the correct answer but were often wrong. Some of the things we learnt were very eye opening and often quite sad. One particularly close to my heart was learning that over two thirds of all people suffering from severe mental health issues cited work stresses as being a contributing factor to their condition. We really all need to do a better job of promoting positive mental health, both in and out of work.

Happy Clients = Happy Life

One way to ensure we’re looking after our team is to ensure we have great relationships with out clients. If we get on well with our clients and genuinely want to see them succeed and grow then work feels more like a collaboration rather than just selling time and skills. During mental health awareness week, we visited two clients where we had over-delivered and built them extra tools that they hadn’t paid for but we knew they’d love. We also bought cupcakes with their logo on …you can’t go wrong with cupcakes!

Mental Health in WordPress

A really scary statistic is that 8% of people within our industry will have had genuine suicidal thoughts in the past 12 months; if you’re a business owner, freelancer or often work remotely then you are more vulnerable to mental health issues. This is a real concern when surveys show that more than 50% of the WordPress community routinely work alone. If you’re working in WordPress and struggling in any way then we thoroughly recommend reaching out to the lovely team at Big Orange Heart (formally known as WP&UP). They are a registered UK charity who support people working within our community to be happy and healthy.

They focus on 4 core hubs with positive mental health at the centre of all they do but recognise that other factors can contribute to mental health issues. So as well as helping with direct mental health issues such as anxiety, depression and addiction – they also offer support and coaching in business skills, web design & development skills and physical health.

Where do we go from here?

We’re a small company and obviously cannot support our team if we cannot remain profitable and sustainable so we must take a balanced approach to all that we do. We already offer flexible working, a shorter working day and generous holiday allowance to our team. We allow people to work remotely at times but we mostly work together from one office. We have music Friday where we share a Spotify playlist and play music into the office to combat everyone sitting in isolation with headphones on.

This is a great start but we want to continue to improve our dialogue around mental health in the workplace. We don’t have concrete policies for what we could and should be doing if a member of the team has a severe mental health issue and we haven’t identified processes for reaching out. We also aren’t spending enough time talking one-to-one with our team about their well-being to ensure they’re happy and growing within their roles and outside of them, we aim to change that.

Wherever you are in your business, however big or small – there are things you can be doing to promote a more positive mental health environment. We’re not claiming to be all that good at it yet but what is important is that it must become a regular consideration in all companies, not just something we think about once a year. If you don’t know where to start, from our experience any gestures, however small, are greatly received.

The post Mental Health Awareness Week at HappyKite appeared first on HappyKite.

TeamMarketing at HappyKite took a trip to the seaside last week for BrightonSEO and we’ve come back with some great ideas to implement for our clients. The line up of speakers was great and we found it really difficult to choose which talks to attend but we’re happy with our choices. Each member of the team has shared their standout talks and highlights of the day below.

Jenny is thinking about joined-up workflow with development and SEO plus talking to John Mueller!

This was my 3rd visit to BrightonSEO. The first being back in 2014 when it was held in The Brighton Dome. With the event getting bigger and bigger each year, it shows the interest and value that this conference brings to the SEO world! The jam-packed schedule of talks was a little overwhelming at first (there were too many to choose from!), but I decided to go with Site Speed, Measurement, Competitor Research & SEO Automation. I opted for a bit of variety with the intent of bringing back some ways of working into my daily role at HappyKite.

My top talk of the day was by Delete’s Head of Search, Polly Pospelova. What I really liked about her talk “How to get a 100 % Lighthouse performance score” is how she highlighted the necessity of both the frontend & backend developers as well as their SEO team having to come together to gain a 100% lighthouse performance score. This combined way of working is what drove their success in gaining 100% on the site speed tool.

We already adopt a similar way of working in HappyKite but we are also keen to develop this further so that there is a mutual understanding of the benefits to a client’s site.

Pospelova’s talk was broken down into the processes taken, changes made, and the results gained. Exactly what you would want to learn from this type of talk and there are some actions that we can implement in our ways of working when looking to improve the speed of a client’s site.

A personal highlight of the day was having the chance to meet and speak to John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google. Unsurprisingly a queue had formed to speak to John who was very patiently answering everyone’s questions (sometimes 4/5 questions!) I chose to just ask one question that I couldn’t find the answer to online. My question was “Businesses in the United Kingdom whose website is on a .eu domain, will Brexit affect them?” Johns response initially was a laugh and then he politely responded with:

[At Google] We see .eu domains as generic and not geo specific, so no, Brexit will not affect the [.eu] domain.

John Mueller in conversation with Jenny Muncey, BrightonSEO 2019

So there you have it! If you have a client based in the UK who has a .eu domain and were worried if there would be any implications with Google’s algorithm after Brexit, John has confirmed there will be none.

Adelaide is thinking about boosting performance with internal links

It was my first time attending BrightonSEO and I really enjoyed listening to the knowledgeable speakers and talking to the sponsors.

The standout talk for me was Christoph Cemper’s ‘Improve your Rankings with Internal Link Building, and no headaches’. It raised an excellent opportunity to think about our internal link structure and how making some small changes could really improve their performance. I particularly found it interesting to think about using more “money phrases” rather than brand phrases in our internal links. Definitely something to think about implementing for ourselves and our clients.

It was great to take a marketing team trip down to Brighton (with 2 of the 3 HappyKite kids in tow too thanks to another great accessible conference with childcare – thanks BrightonSEO!) and we couldn’t have gone back on the train without fish and chips on the beach. Highlight of the day for me, Jenny under siege by hungry seagulls!

Phil is getting excited about Content Gap Analysis

BrightonSEO was really eye opening for me in terms of the sheer scale of the event and the creative ways in which companies are trying to engage with us to use their tools and services! I very much enjoyed the breaks where I sampled doughnuts from Conductor and a SEMRush branded beer!

I got huge value out of nearly every talk I attended, however the stand out talks for me were ‘Building an SEO Exponential Growth model by Closing Your Content Gaps’ by Razvan Gavrilas from CognitiveSEO and ‘How to Make Fake News For Links’ by Oliver Brett from ScreamingFrog.

In closing your website’s content gap with your competitors, it is important to take a step back and not just focus on your new content but review all old content and the keyword opportunities you are missing. Content creation should be an iterative process and continually optimising existing content can reap huge rewards. We’ve learnt some great processes to identify keywords to target, understand the search intent of those keywords and find further opportunities from existing content. Razvan showed us a scalable process to do this largely using Google Search Console and Keyword Planner.

Oliver’s talk was on creating compelling stories as a link building strategy , even if those stories are not… Let’s say fully rooted in reality. It was the funniest talk of the day, with some hilarious tales of the ideas they’ve come up with to help their clients gain attention from the likes of the BBC and even internationally. This isn’t necessarily something we’ll be doing with our clients but really goes to show how creative we can be to gain traction and high quality links.

The post Internal linking, chatting to John Mueller and angry seagulls: BrightonSEO appeared first on HappyKite.

The HappyKite Dev team talk new tech

Our development team love to learn new things and with the speed at which things progress in the web, it’s always good to hear from leading industry experts about what’s coming up. Let’s hear what they enjoyed most.

Mike, Lead Developer focuses on website security

I’ve always come to know any talk by Tim Nash is a safe bet for a mixture of equal parts of humour, honesty and knowledge. Once again Tim did not disappointment, although this time there was a not-too-welcome addition to the usual parts. In ‘Going To The Dark Side, They Have Cookies’ Tim managed to weave in a healthy amount of fear too. I have seen many talks on security, a lot of them from Tim Nash too, the underlying tone to all of them is that you can never be too safe when it comes to the security of your websites, and your clients’ websites. Tim really drove that home when he said:

Security is everyone’s responsibility. That means you, not you thinking ‘everyone’ means ‘someone else but me.’
Tim Nash – WordCamp London 2019

As much as I could keep talking about all of the talks I saw this weekend there is one more that is worth mentioning, ‘I Tried Writing Some Code… You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!’ By Ross Wintle. Highlighting the ‘interesting’ nature of programming, as well as the unique, and conflicting, ways each language will handle specific cases. This is one of the things that I’m sure the majority of us in development both love, for its sheer entertainment, but also hate, for those ‘Cripes!’ moments. It was a massive help too knowing that our Directors were also there, learning just how quirky everything can get in the world of Programming!

Before I begin just summing up every talk I went to, I will end my segment there. A huge thanks to everybody who gave talks this weekend, it’s time now to sit and watch through the livestreams to catch up on the talks I couldn’t make it to!

Orin, Front-end Developer on cutting-edge javascript

There were some really good talks this year. Highlights for me included Zac Gordon’s discussion on the WP Redux based data API which makes data fetching in JavaScript soooo much easier, goodbye ajax! Really excited for this to come to the front end. The caveat, however, is that it is currently really only for gutenberg pages which isn’t ideal for us right now as we haven’t really adopted gutenberg as something we want to use going forward just yet. Exciting for the future never the less as WP becomes more JavaScript focused. Felix Arntz’ talk on Web Components, something I didn’t know existed. And Tom Nowell’s talk on HTTP/2 which is something that I’ve been aware of but just not to the extent of what you can do with it. The ability to prefetch resources with the initial request is going to save so much time. Can’t wait until we get this turned on on our servers so we can seriously start improving our site load times.

Another talk I also really enjoyed, in a terrifying kind of way, was Tim Nash’s talk on security, aptly named “Going to the dark side, they have cookies” which highlighted some of the real world examples he’s come across of mistakes people make that make their site vulnerable. He also highlighted some of the tools he uses to diagnose issues which is something we would be able to implement in our own security testing.

Ronan, Junior Developer on his first WordCamp

I had a great time this weekend at WordCamp London. This was the first conference I have been to since joining HappyKite and it’s safe to say I’d go again!

Whilst I took away a lot of new information and things to think about my favourite speaker was Felix Arntz with ‘Introduction to web components‘. In this talk Felix discussed how we could use web components as another tool that can be used on its own or with the React library and how we can create/edit Gutenberg blocks. With Gutenberg still in its infancy it’s great to learn as much as possible so we can start to utilise it to our advantage.

Another interesting takeaway was that I could use web components as an alternative to Vue or React to create custom HTML elements as most browsers natively support web components – except for IE & Edge, but thanks to Polyfills we can still use web components in those browsers.

I look forward to learning more about web components and using them  in my work.

The HappyKite Marketing team on new ideas to help our clients

It’s a busy time for the marketing team at HappyKite with WordCamp this weekend and BrightonSEO to look forward to next week so we’re full of great new ideas. Here are our most memorable moments from the conference:

Jenny, Digital Marketing Manager on website speed benefits with HTTP/2

WordCamp London 2019 was the first WordCamp conference that I have attended. I thought there was a good variety of talks on offer for people and they were really accessible. The whole WordPress community attending were really friendly, and the weekend had good vibes.

My favourite talk of the weekend was by Tom J Nowell “HTTP/2 Push For The Stars”. I was already aware that HTTP/2 had speed benefits but I didn’t know about being able to preload assets using the prefetch link tag or ‘pushing’ via the functions.php or auto-pushing from PHP with Nginx. This is definitely something that I want to try with our clients and benchmark the benefits.

A bonus of the weekend was being able to bring my son George along to the event and take advantage of the child care. He had a great time and loved going on a train adventure into London. Having this on offer really opens up who can attend these events and is a real asset to the conference.

Rebecca, Content & Social Marketer on the importance of micro-copy

As always, this year’s WordCamp was interesting, inspiring, fun, and most of all useful. There were lots of helpful tips and advice being given not only by the speakers but also by the friendly sponsors. I wanted to give a special mention to Big Orange Heart (formally known as WP&UP) – a charity that provides mental health support within the WordPress community. Mental health is something that should not be stigmatised and their open approach to speaking about it is something I am sure a lot of people within the community will find comforting and most of all, helpful.

There were many great talks again this year, but my favourite talk was called ‘Effective copywriting tips for better UX’ by Andrea Zoellener. It was so interesting to learn that doing simple things with website copy you might otherwise not put much thought into, such as error message copy that informs you of what has gone wrong or helpful language when using the checkout, can make all the difference to the reader.

One of the parts I found most helpful was in regard to empathy and how we need to not only try to be in the customers shoes for matters of ease of use, but also in regard to their emotions or feelings. We need to use language to comfort them and let them know that they are safe on your website by implementing things such things as;

• Personal data security – reassure users that their personal data is safe
• Receiving spam – let your customers know that they won’t receive spam when giving their email address
• Reversible changes so no pressure – for example, letting them know that they can change their user name at a later date

All these things and more can be overlooked in the micro-copy but can make all the difference to the reader and especially so when it comes to things such as e-Commerce.

Adelaide, Account Manager on circles of trust and focusing on client relationships

Having been to quite a number of WordCamps now I really enjoy the range of perspectives and differing viewpoints of people within our community. I leave each time feeling inspired to look inwards at our practices and processes to see where we can fine-tune things.

This year I really enjoyed Yvette Sonneveld’s session called ‘Sales Funnel = Sausage Maker?’. It really resonated with me since her ideals are so aligned with ours. She advocates a more sustainable and less hard-sell sales funnel with a focus on circles of trust with existing client relationships at the centre. This is absolutely how we run our business, with no hard-sell and an emphasis on building long-lasting relationships with our clients so it was great to hear some of her ideas for how we can develop this.

My favourite quote from the conference from Piccia in her session on ‘UX for Everyone’:

Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.

Piccia Neri – WordCamp London 2019

Once again, I loved how the event is so inclusive for all, the Saturday night social was great for everyone too  – with the table football being a particular favourite for a certain 6 year old and his dad! We were lucky to be able to take the HappyKite children along thanks to the amazing event childcare provided by Nipperbout Ltd, which made a weekend conference much more accessible for our team.

Phil, Creative Director on content monetisation strategies

We’ve been attending WordCamp London since 2013 and I always look forward to it. This year I spent a lot less time in the actual talks than I would normally do and chatted with a lot of other agency owners, freelancers and friends – both old and new.

A real highlight for me was the presence of the Big Orange Heart (formally known as WP&UP) stand, a charity offering mental health support and companionship to our community, a much needed and very well received service. It was great to hear about their plans for the future and find out how we can help.

The stand out talks for me were (once again!) Dave Lockie from Angry Creative (formally known as Pragmatic), who spoke about monetisation strategies around content and shared a really useful way of mapping overall content strategy. We will be implementing a version of this into our own procedures to enhance our consulting practices with clients and to help find any areas of opportunity in our current approach.

I also loved the talk by Ross Wintle on the oddities of coding and the joys found in experimenting and being curious, it was accessible to the non-devs in our team whilst also being engaging to the experienced programmers.

All in all, we had a great weekend and have come back with a whole heap of ideas on how to develop our practice and grow our clients’ businesses. We are so grateful for all the effort from Dan Maby and Babs Saul, the co-organisers, and all the volunteers for making these events possible.

See you next year WordCamp London!

The post HappyKite at WordCamp London 2019 – Our Highlights appeared first on HappyKite.

Where to begin?

The biggest task for this was giving the ability to output an XML for each order. We began by hooking into the normal WooCommerce Order Processing action.

As you can see above we hooked into ‘woo commerce_order_status_processing’ action. I wanted to make sure that this was the last thing to run, so I had all the information I might need at my disposal.

There are 2 variables being declared, only one of which is being used at the moment, the second was added at a later date (This is explained within the Finishing Touches).

Once you have added the above function we can now begin to set up the XML output. Thankfully we have the filter above. This will allow us to manipulate what is returned.

The nitty gritty of the XML

Below is a complete function that will create the contents of a very small XML. There is minimal output, as the needs for each website will almost definitely be different. I have added comments to the function to explain each step within.

As you can see from the above function we are passing the order object into our filter. We are using DOMDocument to create the XML as opposed to SimpleXML. Both work nicely, although I personally prefer using DOMDocument as you can have more control over everything with various Node Types as well as being a little more forgiving.

Once you have a DOMDocument set, you can begin adding to it. In the above example I only use 2 different functions to build out the XML. These are $xml->createElement( ‘ElementName’, ‘ElementContents’ ); and $parentVariable->appendChild( $childVariable );. These are both pretty self explanatory, one is used to create a new element, this is essentially a group that will hold all the information that is assigned to it. AppendChild is used to assign specific information to an Element.

Below is the XML outputted from the above example:

Nice finishing touches.

As this was for a client we added a few finishing touches to it. We added an order note to each order so the client could easily check whether an XML had been generated. We also hooked into the WooCommerce Order Actions and added the ability to regenerate the XML.

The post Creating an easy XML generator for WooCommerce appeared first on HappyKite.

We weren’t off to a brilliant start for our first WordCamp Europe with our flight to Vienna cancelled due to…faulty toilets! Nevertheless, after an unexpected visit to Munich we did eventually make it to Vienna and arrived at our charming AirBnB apartment pretty quickly.

It was a great location about 10 minutes walk away from the conference venue, the 35º heat made that walk a little uncomfortable but considering the British weather this summer we’ll take any sun we can get! We had planned in an extra sightseeing day after the conference had finished so we could focus on the task at hand first – WordCamp Europe!

We’ve each put together our highlights of the weekend…

Phil loved talking shop

The more WordCamps I attend, the more I am drawn to the business talks. I spend far too long on Dribbble and in various design communities, we can usually solve our development problems inhouse or on StackOverflow but the business-end of things often has me feeling like I’m wandering alone in the wilderness. So, as with Wordcamp London, my highlights were the talks by other agency owners.

The stand out talk coming from David Lockie, founder of Pragmatic, one of the UKs largest WordPress agencies and a Gold tier WooExpert (something we aspire to be one day!). His talk on ‘The Discovery & Definition Approach to Project Planning‘ was really eye-opening, he talked about the gap between our thinking and the clients thinking when discussing a project and the process of making sure there are no surprises or mismatched expectations near the end of the project. I absolutely love solving client problems and turning around failing stores, but I think that sometimes my enthuasism to jump in has left too many questions unanswered – leading to extra work that we hadn’t planned for. By implementing a thorough discovery process to a project, we can come out the other end with a happy client, a happy agency and as a bonus – we’ll have all met our business objectives.

David’s talk was actually the last talk in a Saturday morning packed full of quality talks aimed specifically at agencies, all of which were really useful for me. One other stand out talk from the morning was ‘How we built a successful, distributed WordPress firm serving nonprofits‘ by Lesley Molecke of Cornershop Creative. She spoke about their journey as an agency, how they began (literally including screenshots of their very first ‘chat’) and why they chose to do what they’ve done. It left me very motivated to grow the business further, they seem like a really lovely team who have a great deal of respect for one another and thoroughly enjoy working together.

My final recommendation for freelancers and agencies in our space is to watch a talk by Tomaz Zaman, the founder of Codeable, called ‘You are too cheap‘. Before any clients reading this begin to panic, the talk was not just about underselling yourself, it was also about how techy people need to stop talking about technical implementations to our clients and start talking about solving business needs and finding out how we can deliver real value to our clients. This is something that I feel we are already very good at, in eCommerce it is very easy to measure the return from a project and we love to give store owners a fantastic return on investment. However it is always nice to have your methods validated and Tomaz is an outstanding speaker.

Adelaide brushed up on content and looked forward to the future

As usual, the schedule at WordCamp Europe 2016 was full to bursting with great talks on a range of topics. There were a few real stand out talks for me, the first of which was the business panel on Friday morning about cultivating happy teams for better business. It was great to see that so much of what we strive for in our business culture and lifestyle aligned with theirs and pick up some new ideas for developing our team.

A little later in the morning on Friday I was at the short talks and was particularly inspired by Angela Badgley’s ‘Publish in 10 minutes a day‘ with some great tips for making sure you post regular content. I particularly liked this slide:

All too often things just don’t get finished because we’re sure we could make them just a little bit better, but as she said, ‘perfect is the enemy of done’ and sometimes it’s better to pragmatic about these things!

I also love love loved Tomaz Zaman’s talk ‘You are too cheap’ but Phil’s already told you about that! However, my absolute favourite talk was a little off-topic I guess but not entirely unrelated to what I do day-to-day. Shiobhan McKeown gave a passionate and insightful talk about how we communicate online in the 21st century and how the echo chambers our online communities form lull us into a sense that everyone aligns with our views. In light of the recent referendum results she actually changed the end of her talk and it really hit home with me – a very emotional 30 minutes.

(and the bus tour!)

Now, to talk about Vienna – it’s beautiful, I mean really beautiful. The imperialist architecture, lavish mansions and palaces and art culture at every corner was wonderful. My highlight would have to be the history lesson we got on the bus tour around the city, it’s definitely got me wanting to find out more about the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So fascinating to hear that the likes of Trotsky, Lenin, Hitler and Freud were all living and socialising within a square mile of each other in Vienna, mindblowing.

Mike got stuck in with some back end dev talks…

As usual we had planned, almost to an extreme, our individual schedules and mine began with one of my favourite topics, the WordPress Command Line. Marcos Schratzenstaller gave a talk called ‘WP-CLI for beginners’. I have written a blog post before about my adventures with the WP-CLI and I would be the first to tell you that I am in no way an expert with the WP-CLI. Marcos gave a great overview of the capabilities of the WP-CLI along with a whole host of commands, complete with working examples. It really opens your eyes to the sheer capabilities of the WordPress Command Line!

Following on with the same topic, of the WP-CLI, another great talk from the weekend was one of the last. ‘My condolences, you’re now the maintainer of a popular open-source project’ by Daniel Bachhuber. Daniel is the maintainer for WP-CLI. His talk didn’t go into any technical details about the WP-CLI, instead it was about the pressures and the responsibility of maintaining a piece of open source software. We have released a few plugins ourselves and have many more planned, so this was a real eye opener about the proper way to look after your work, and how to get the most out of it, for both yourself and the users.

Last but most definitely not least, the WP REST API. Joe Hoyle, one of the main contributors for the REST API gave an hour long talk about the complete ins and outs of the WP REST API. For somebody like myself who has heard all about the REST API, but doesn’t really know anything about it, this was a perfect talk. Joe went into detail about everything that is possible with the REST API and what will be coming in the future. Joe topped this talk off nicely with a demo of his new open-source native iOS app, aptly named ‘Vienna’. This app was built in React native and uses the WP REST API to interact with WordPress. Lets just say it went down a storm!

…and was impressed by the architecture

Thankfully, the whole team at HappyKite stayed in Vienna for a bit longer to sightsee, after all it would be criminal to stay in Vienna and not tour around the city! After exploring, and getting rather sunburnt, one thing really sticks in my mind, just how unique Vienna is. There are clearly several different cultures and styles alive at the same time, the buildings and the architecture are enough proof of that! My favourite part of Vienna, other than the little shop down the road from our apartment, has to have been the Parliament. It was such an eye catching building, really unique.

Bye bye Vienna!

We hope to see you at WordCamp Europe again next year in Paris!

The post Our highlights of WordCamp Europe 2016 in Vienna appeared first on HappyKite.

The majority of eCommerce sites will redirect you to the basket after you add a product. It is slowly but surely becoming an industry standard. WooCommerce has a setting to allow you to do this on your own eCommerce site very easily.

What is wrong with the Current Continue Shopping Button then?

Well, as of the creation of this plugin, the WooCommerce Continue Shopping button always took the customer back to the homepage of your website. If you were predominantly a blog, with a small shop then this could cause confusion and would interrupt the shopping experience for the customer, which worst case scenario could result in cart abandonment.

More recently however this will now default to taking the customer back to the shop page. This is a lot smoother and will work nicely. However what if you had multiple categories, or even a product with a large amount of Variations. If the customer wanted to buy a Medium T-Shirt in both Green and Blue then they would need to navigate through the categories again.

What can I do to solve this?

Thankfully, there is a handy filter to allow you to easily change this link.

Of course, if you are not a developer, or even if you are, plugins are always a great help. We manage multiple eCommerce sites and have come been asked on many occasions to change where the ‘Continue Shopping’ button went to; this has ranged from a ‘Current Sales’ landing page, to the most recently visited category.

As such we created the Continue Shopping for WooCommerce plugin to easily and quickly change the destination.

What exactly does this plugin do?

Once you have downloaded and installed the Continue Shopping for WooCommerce plugin you will see a new WooCommerce settings page.

From here you are given 5 choices, to go back to the original WooCommerce default and send the customer back to the home page or send them back to the shop.

We have added three extra options, which are the most recently viewed Product, recently viewed Category and a custom link. The first 2 are fairly self explanatory. The latter allows you to send the customer to any link you want, this can be very handy if you like to emphasise landing pages, or even monthly/daily offers.

Where can I get the plugin?

Continue Shopping for WooCommerce is on the WordPress.org repository. As such you can find it from within the plugins section of wp-admin, you can also download it directly from the Plugin page on WordPress.org

As with the rest of our plugins, we will constantly be updating and improving this plugin too. For the next version we already have a couple of features planned. For instance when the Basket is empty you are greeted with ‘Your cart is currently empty.’ and a Return To Shop button. As with above there is a handy filter for this, although if you can wait we will be adding the ability to change this link with the next release.

If you have used this plugin, or any of our other plugins we would love to hear your thoughts and feedback!

The post Changing the Continue Shopping link within WooCommerce appeared first on HappyKite.

What is the WordPress Command Line?

As of WordPress 3.7 and later (rather old now!) there has been the WordPress Command Line, WP-CLI for short. With the introduction of WP-CLI came a faster way to do the basics, through to the most advanced functions all from the comfort of your Terminal.

I won’t go over the installation of WP-CLI here, there is a nice guide for all the basics over at https://wp-cli.org/. 

As a standard with WP-CLI you can change almost everything within WordPress core. There are functions for everything ranging from creating a new blog post, to updating WordPress and any Plugins, all the way to exporting the Database. When you first look into WP-CLI it can all appear rather daunting.

As all developers should be, I was eager to improve my knowledge and wanted to try to conquer WP-CLI, if you are the same, or even slightly curious about WP-CLI then I would 100% recommend playing around with it on a local development site. After playing around with it for a while I decided to try to implement WP-CLI into our most successful plugin, Ultimate Under Construction.

Why should you use the WordPress Command Line?

The WordPress Command Line is a brilliant tool. Do you get annoyed by pesky time consuming updates? If only there was a way to automate updates, or anything else for that matter. Well that is where the WordPress Command Line comes in handy. 

As you get more used to working with the command line and it all becomes second nature, the WP-CLI can be one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. Everything ranging from switching over your current Theme to creating a batch file to run multiple functions concurrently.

We use a variety of batch files, The most useful one being for updates. Using our Under Construction plugin we can now enable the under construction page, check for WP updates, update any required Plugins and Themes all from running one batch file.

Much like with git or any other command line tool the more you use it, the more you discover its power. Without much further ado I will begin teaching you the basics of WordPress Command Line.

A working example of the WordPress Command Line

The first step is to check that WP-CLI is running and works on your version of WordPress, which it should be if you keep your site secure and up to date. Below is the function we used to check for WP-CLI, within this function we are requiring our new WP-CLI classes.

Once that is done the next task is to create our new class. We are going to be extending the WP-CLI class “WP_CLI_Command”. Here is a snippet of code for the class. I will then go through the basic functions we have implemented into the plugin.

The WordPress Command Line class works the same as every other class. Once you have the class you can easily create a new function. These will finish off your WP-CLI command, for example if you have added a new command of “uuc” and then created a function called “enable”, then typing “wp uuc enable” into the command line will run the enable function within your new class extension of the WP-CLI.

Each function can, and probably should, be given instructions, this is done as below. All the useful information within the comment will be displayed when you run the help command “wp help uuc”.

As you can see from the function above, before we are declaring the function we have a few lines. The first line is the purpose of the function. Next we have a list of examples of the function within the command line. Now when you run “wp uuc help” within the command line you will see your new function name under Subcommands along with the purpose of your new function, see the below image for an example.

Finally, we want our new Enable function to do something useful. In the context of our plugin we want to use our new function to enable the under construction page.

This is done once again, like any other PHP function would be. The above code will be added into the function, this will grab the currently saved settings for the plugin using ‘get_option’. We are then checking if the Under construction page is currently enabled or not. If not we are then enabling the page and updating the options, finally we are returning a message to the command line. You will see ‘WP_CLI::success’. This will return the below success message.

There are 3 main ways to return an output to the command line. These are ‘success’ which we have already used. ‘Error’ which is fairly self explanatory, and finally ‘log’ which would be used to return a plain string to the console. The image below shows a brief example of each return.

Learning more

This is a brief example of what you can do with WP-CLI, I will be writing another blog post once Ultimate Under Construction version 2.0 is released, going over the more advanced WP-CLI features we have so stay turned to learn some more!

If you want to learn more about WP-CLI you can take a look at some of the resources I used when writing the above code, below is a list of useful resources.

• The Post Status Podcast did an excellent episode about the WordPress Command Line.
• Of course you can always go to wp-cli.org for the entire documentation.
• The entire project is, as usual, hosted on Github.

The post Getting to grips with WordPress Command line appeared first on HappyKite.

We’ve each come up with our favourite session of the weekend (no one picked the same as anyone else) and we’re going to tell you why we thought they were the most awesome – excuse the bizarre and disjointed nature, we all have pretty different writing styles!

Phil was inspired by Moove’s ‘5 Year Journey’

The whole weekend was fantastic; I think I spent more time in Track B than anywhere else. My favourite session was actually the very first of the Saturday morning, which was a talk by Ilona and Adrian from Moove titled ‘Building an Innovative WordPress Agency: Moove’s 5 Year Journey’. It was really motivating to see how they began and how they have grown.

There are a number of fantastic WordPress agencies in the UK who we aspire to be like, but perhaps none more than Moove as we are also a design-led agency looking to do truly innovative things in WordPress, although in our case – specifically within eCommerce. If I was to pick one thing to take away from all that they said, it would be that quality of work is key to growing and is a great form of marketing, we should always be trying to overdeliver on what our clients are expecting, whatever their budget.

Read the full write up here.

Orin was feeling RESTful with Petya

This was my first WordCamp and I really enjoyed it! I think my favourite talk was by Petya Raykovska on the REST API.

Aside from the wonderfully different Wapuu slides, especially the poor, overworked and about to burn out Wapuu, she was informative about what the REST API is and how it works. Even though it was a talk geared towards non-developers, it gave a great overview of what it is, and more importantly how it can be used and what it means for the future of WordPress. It was interesting to think about how its implementation will effect website owners and how they will manage and maintain their website.

She also touched on the current limitations of the API and detailed what it can’t do and what developers would have to work around. One example would be that because it is primarily a JavaScript API, serving up pages to users without JavaScript enabled is going to be an issue and something that we as developers are going to have to work around. I’m going to have a look at React.js, as well as other JavaScript frameworks such as Backbone, Node and Angular (which there was also a great session on) and start learning. Let the education commence!

Read Petya’s full guide here.

Mike was ‘Hacked Off’ with Tim Nash

This year was my second WordCamp, so I had a good idea of what to expect and was really looking forward to quite a few talks. As it turned out, I spent most of my weekend sat in Track C. Of all the talks I heard there, one definitely stuck out to me. Tim ‘Works for a hosting Company’ Nash delivered a brilliant talk about site security and how to deal with a hacked site.

I’m fairly certain almost everybody learnt just how unprepared we all were to deal with a large-scale hacking attack and that most of us put too much trust in hosting companies to take routine backups for us. I definitely learnt a lot over the whole weekend but Tim’s mixture of humour and scaremongering stuck with me and has already had me beavering away this morning to make a few changes to our processes.

We don’t think Tim’s put his slides up online – if we’re wrong please tell us!

Adelaide is… feeling indecisive!

After a great weekend of awesome speakers (and delicious food of course) I’m finding it difficult to narrow down my highlights to a single speaker – I’m going to be indecisive and talk about two instead, one from Saturday and one from Sunday! There’s a specific reason for this though, and that’s because my absolute favourite session of the weekend had little to do with my job, it was just truly inspirational. That was, of course, the discussion of neurodiversity and ‘The Myth of a Normal Brain’ with Leena Haque.

The insight Leena, as a person with an autism spectrum condition, gave into how she experiences the world was just brilliant. In particular her video walking us through a morning at work for her at the BBC – it was both hilarious and humbling. It really made me think about the barriers within the workplace, and particularly in the recruitment process, for people who experience the world differently from me. I love that it left me with more questions than answers – it really made me think about how we, as a company, should position ourselves to support neurodiversity as we grow.

We don’t think Leena’s super awesome .gifs are online yet – if we’re wrong please tell us!

My second highlight was more work-based for me in the traditional sense in that it’s something I can see myself thinking about every day at work. Ross Wintle‘s session ‘User Experience: It’s for Everyone’ was a great discussion about the importance of, the difficulties in achieving, and the wide range of roles involved in a great user experience.

Ross’ mantra that user experience is important, is for everyone and is hard really got me thinking about the fact that great UX is not just about designing a great UI (user interface). He reminded me that I also have a big role to play in user experience despite not being either a designer or a developer – I’ll definitely be asking more questions, thinking more carefully and reading Joel Marsh’s UX for Beginners.

Ross says his slides will be available online soon – we’ll update when they are!

In conclusion…

1. WordCamp London 2016 was awesome
2. The organisers did an amazing job
3. The speakers were varied, funny, informative and inspirational
4. We in the WordPress community ‘ARE NOT NORMAL’ (says Ross Wintle)
5. The food was yum!
6. We can’t wait for WordCamp Europe in June!

The post Our favourite bits from WordCamp London 2016 appeared first on HappyKite.

Different solutions for different budgets

The problem with not knowing your budget is that we don’t know what kind of solution is going to be right for you. Brace yourself, here comes the metaphor…

When walking into a car dealership, it is understandable to not want to give them your top price – as it is then their job to sell you the most expensive car they can for that budget. If, instead though, we imagined a crazy world in which there wasn’t a car dealership so much as a place that solved transportation problems. You walk in and say you need to regularly get from point A to point B, budget is going to immediately be a factor in whether you’re looking for a push bike, a car or a private jet. The conversation about needs, requirements and objectives will differ greatly.

To continue along with my rather odd metaphor. We see ourselves as offering a range of beautiful cars, and your budget and requirements will let us know whether you need a large car with room for a whole family, a high-performance sports car or a more affordable small car. Our questions will be about the car interior, the fuel type, what sort of mileage you need to be doing etc. These questions (and we as an agency) are not suitable if your budget is more in the range for a bicycle. Similarly, if you’ve come to us looking for a private jet, then we’ll need to refer you to someone larger and more equipped to meet your requirements.

So how much does a WooCommerce store cost?

Let’s return to the world of web design and eCommerce – seeing as I actually know very little about cars!

If your budget is less than £1,000 then the best solution for you is going to be to roll up your sleeves, learn a bit about WordPress, buy a pre-made theme and a couple of plugins, get some hosting and do most of the work yourself and then maybe pay a freelancer to do some more advanced modifications for you. Alternatively you might not even be looking at WordPress and WooCommerce as your solution at all and instead could maybe look at one of the hosted services like Shopify that offer less flexibility but are more affordable in the short term.

If your budget is between £1,000 and £5000 then there will be freelancers out there who can help you. For a team of experienced specialists like ourselves, this is not really enough to achieve your goals properly but we could perhaps look at doing some aspects, with you again needing to take quite a DIY approach.

If you’re looking to invest between £5,000 and £15,000 then your budget is reasonable for a standard eCommerce site. With a budget like this you’ll get all the good stuff like wireframes, custom design, a bespoke theme and modern development so your site is responsive (looks great on all devices), secure and lightning fast to load. We’ll walk you through the whole process and take all the necessary steps to help you achieve your business goals.

If your looking to invest between £15,000 and £35,000 then, as well as getting all of the above, you’re likely to also have additional budget for integration with other systems (such as SAP) so stock management, customer management etc can all be streamlined. You will also then be able to get more advanced site features such as product builders, live customer feeds etc.

If your budget is in the range of £50,000 and upwards then, as much as we’d love to work with you, we’re probably not the right fit for you. Typically you’ve got specific ways in which you need to operate that just can’t be accommodated by a smaller agency such as ourselves. Feel free to get in touch though and we’d be happy to refer you to an agency who can help you with that.

Importance of goals

Another reason that we need to know your budget is that we need to know your goals, what sort of return you are looking for from your online store, how many sales would you need the site to generate to be deemed a success, where would you like the site to be in a year? We are not solely a development firm, we are a full service eCommerce agency – our mission is to help you grow your WooCommerce store and so a healthy discussion about where you see the store in 12-24 months and how much you are prepared to invest to get there are essential to building a partnership which stands the best chance of achieving those goals.

Next steps

So, now that you’re hopefully a little less afraid to speak about budget and have a better idea of whether we’d be a good fit for you, why not get in touch and see how we can help you grow your online business? If you still don’t have a budget in mind at all and are not even sure of what goals to set, then you actually need a discovery session before you jump head on into a project – we can help you with that.

The post Why we ask for a website budget appeared first on HappyKite.