• Magento
• WP e-commerce
• Shopp Plugin
• Market Theme
• WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin — have not tried yet
• WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart Plugin — have not tried yet
• Yak for WordPress
• ArtPal – Paypal shopping cart for artists
• PHPurchase
• eshop – utilizes posts and pages to create products
• ShopperPress – theme and shopping cart all in one

Comparing these is like comparing apples to oranges with Magento being a full robust solution and Market Theme being a  simple solution for a very basic store. A big difference between these solutions is whether or not the solution is really a full-featured store software that has reporting, gift certificates, cross selling, and other options. Which you choose will depend on your e-commerce needs.

For the most part, NONE of the WordPress plugins are full featured e-commerce solutions. They are simplified applicaitons with some of them having more features than others. When comparing WordPress solutions, they fall into five categories:

1. Store products based on WordPress posts and pages. In other words, you create posts within a certain category, and these posts make up the products in your store.
2. Store products managed in separate database table that is managed via the plugin interface. I prefer these solutions, because my clients have many products, and I don’t want to deal with the products in the WordPress Posts area as I want to keep my blog very separate from my store products.
3. Theme based solutions. These work similarly to the post-based products, and perhaps are a good solution for someone who has very basic needs and doesn’t have to have customize a lot.
4. Simply PayPal add to cart buttons that can be created on the fly. This would be for a site with just a few simple products.
5. Full featured online shopping cart (not a WordPress plugin), like Magento, that could be hooked up with WordPress, so that WordPress could handle the overall look of the site while Magento takes care of all the shopping aspects.

Market Theme while touted as being a really great product is too simple for most of my client’s needs. It’s missing a lot of functionality with its lack of variations choices, pricing and shipping options for different variations, integrated shipping, checkout options, and payment gateways.

The Shopp Plugin is very nicely formatted out of the box. The templates can be copied to your local theme file and modified to your heart’s content. I like the way the user is taken to a checkout page after adding an item to the cart and being able to “continue shopping.” It has variations templates that can be used for different product categories and shipping options based on weight or price. However, I don’t like that notes cannot be added per product or that the checkout screen cannot be customized to add more fields. It also doesn’t have reporting. I will be testing this plugin with the integrated UPS module and Paypal Payments Pro and hope that Paypal can provide the reporting we need.

I recently installed the Shopp Plugin at http://www.brigittemars.com if you want to check out her Books/DVD section. Customizing the templates and CSS was easy enough, though I encountered some limitations with not being able to display products within a certain category on a given catalog page.

WP e-commerce has been a source of frustration for me as it is buggy with the variations for downloadable files and generally doesn’t look that great out of the box, particularly the way the checkout “box” is formatted and displayed. I do like that you can customize the checkout page with your own fields. It also has some nice, basic reporting.

Magento is kick ass but may not work well in a shared hosting environment. I did see that someone developed a Magento extension to integrate with WordPress. Smashing magazine reviewed many great templates for Magento recently.

I’m quite interested in Drupal using Ubercart as a great CMS, blogging, and integrated e-commerce solution, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it. I just purchased O’Reilly Media’s Using Drupal book which I’m very eager to read. It provides the first printed documentation of Ubercart with step-by-step instructions.

Many of my clients would like the ability to sell Gift Certificates redeemable in the cart. This is hit and miss with all of these solutions, with Magento most likely to handle correctly now and Ubercart developers working hard to get their GC module working properly. However, with Paypal, we can always sell Paypal Gift Certificates, but users must be logged in with their Paypal account when purchasing in order to redeem.

Generally, I am currently look for low-cost solutions that allow users to take advantage of the great easy-to-use WordPress interface and not necessarily have to leave the site to go shopping. Your feedback, comments, and experiences would be great appreciated.

Here’s another list of 10 e-commerce plugins: http://speckyboy.com/2008/10/23/10-powerful-shoppingecommerce-plugin-solutions-for-wordpress/

Here’s a nice site for e-commerce tips and choosing a good shopping cart: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/

The simple and clean yet colorful design by The Parks Group in Boulder fit with the international theme of Bodeux’s services.

The staff now maintains the site entirely on their own with occasional assistance. It was a joy to work with Nancy Monson, the school director, as she very quickly picked up on how to upload images and edit her content and embraced WordPress gladly for its ease of use.

• http://perishablepress.com/
• http://lorelle.wordpress.com/wordpress-resources/
• http://www.webdesignerwall.com/
• http://mashable.com/
• http://smashingmagazine.com
• http://speckyboy.com/
• http://webdesignledger.com/
• http://www.instantshift.com/
• http://wpguy.com/
• http://wpcandy.com/
• http://weblogtoolscollection.com/
• http://www.wordpressdaddy.com/
• http://wphacks.com/
• http://www.nathanrice.net/
• http://www.darrenhoyt.com/
• http://net.tutsplus.com/
• http://blog.steffanantonas.com/100-killer-wordpress-resources.htm

My Favorite WordPress Tweeps

• http://twitter.com/instantshift – web development, wordpress, and more
• http://twitter.com/sixrevisions – social media, design
• http://twitter.com/speckyboy – wordpress and general web development and design
• http://twitter.com/lorelleonwp – wordpress related
• http://twitter.com/DesignerDepot – general design tweets
• http://twitter.com/smashingmag – wordpress and general web development, design, and social media
• http://twitter.com/chriscoyier – CSS expert
• http://twitter.com/askwpgirl – that would be me! wordpress and boulder wp related
• http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays - hilarious tweets! you just need something to distract you every now and then

WordPress Books

• The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 3rd Edition (http://www.sitepoint.com/books/cssant3/)
• Digging Into WordPress
• WordPress 2.8 Theme Customization (available from Amazon)

WordPress Most Popular Plugins

• Most popular plugins – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/browse/popular/
• 25 Most Popular WordPress Plugins You Should Know About  – http://askwpgirl.com/25-top-wordpress-plugins-you-should-know-about/

WordPress Video Tutorials

• http://wordpress.tv/
• http://lynda.com

General Web Development Advice

• http://blog.webdistortion.com/ — direct from Ireland comes this fabulous blog with frequent tips on web design, website coding, website marketing, blogging, and more. I share more links from this blog than any other.
• http://w3schools.com/ — this comprehensive resource is a lifesaver

Working with the festival earned me an invite from Adjei and his wife Kari for a three-week trip to see their family in Ghana last Christmas.  I celebrated my 40th birthday there sitting on a concrete floor, eating dry chocolate cookies and learning how to play the four variations of Oware, an abstract strategy game consisting of 12 wood cups and 48 seeds which you move from cup to cup — a serious, competitive adult game! (You can read some of my travel tales here.)

The new BaoBao Festival site took about 8 hours to design and implement and uses:

• Customized version of Panorama Theme
• NextGen Gallery for photo galleries and a header slideshow using the JW Player
• Viper’s Video Quicktags for embedding YouTube videos
• Event Calendar (by Alex Tingle) to show upcoming events
• Customized page template with a customized WordPress loop using wp_query to show both the page content as well as the posts in the Events category

When I first came back from Peru, I would wake in the middle of the night and not know where I was. I would stare and stare into the darkness of the bedroom and swear that the walls were made of adobe and the doorway to the bathroom was really a stone hallway leading somewhere.

This morning when I woke, I wondered what day it was, and realized that it was two weeks ago today that I rose at 4 am to wonder the ruins of Machu Picchu, the evil mosquito bites on my calves still slightly itchy and healing.

In the misty light of that beautiful early morning, we walked up and down and down and up the steep, stone staircases of this ancient city. For awhile, I wondered by myself in and out of labyrinth like rooms and hallways, and I imagined fabric, gold, silver, tables, chairs, dishes, pottery, people, children, and the thatch roofs now returned to the earth. I wondered what it was like to be a peasant here, to be carving and placing these giant stones, harvesting the grain, weaving the textiles, and shepherding the animals. I imagined the wind and lightning and torrential rain and the demand to donate three months labor each year to the Emperor.

When we returned to the retreat center in Pisac, the place we’d first landed and the place from which we’d depart, from all these impressions and experiences, all I wanted was to read poetry. It seemed the only appropriate thing to do, and I craved it like I do a piece of chocolate at that time of the month. I wondered Pisac looking for a bookstore and could find none. What I most wanted for some curious reason was Pablo Neruda. I settled on a book left abandoned at the retreat center called, The Dogs of Babel, that was strangely satisfying: me, at a loss for words, seeking the words of a dead poet to fill my heart, and finding instead a story of a linguist trying to teach his dog to speak.

Tonight, as the snow falls and the smell of soup and fresh baked bread fills the house, I climb into a hot bath with The Essential Neruda and turn pages randomly until I find, to my surprise, Neruda’s canon on Machu Picchu. Ah! This is what I had craved in Pisac. Pablo Neruda climbing Machu Picchu, writing of love, the lives of long dead peasants, the power of the Urubamba River and storms and lightning, of bloodshed, and these rarefied heights.

The editor of the book carried a selection of translations of Neruda’s throughout his South American travels and even up to the silver stones of Machu Picchu, finally landing in Chile where he conceived the idea with a young Chilean woman to create a new set of translations in honor of Neruda’s 100 year birthday (in 2004).

The quote at the beginning of the book is:

“On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.” — Pablo Neruda

Only a few poems from the Machu Picchu canon are in these selections, and a later book was written about the craft of translation based on this one translator’s experience with the Machu Picchu canon. That will be next on my Amazon wishlist. For now, I’d like to share with a few passages that took my breath away and one full poem. If you’d like Spanish original, let me know. They, of course, should be read in their original Spanish:

From Heights of Machu Picchu: I

“From air to air, like an empty net,
I went wondering between the streets and the
atmosphere, arriving and saying goodbye,
leaving behind in autumn’s advent the coin extended
from the leaves, and between Spring and the what,
that which the greatest love, as within a falling glove,
hands over to us like a large moon.”

Heights of Machu Picchu: VI

And then on the ladder of the earth I climbed
through the atrocious thicket of the lost jungles
up to you, Machu Picchu.
High city of scaled stones,
at last a dwelling where the terrestrial
did not hide in its sleeping clothes.
In you, like two parallel lines,
the cradle of the lightning-bolt and man
rocked together in a thorny wind.

Mother of stone, spume of the condors.

High reef of the human dawn.

Shovel lost in the first sand.

This was the dwelling, this is the place:
here the wide kernels of maize rose up
and fell again like red hail.

Here the gold thread was fleeced off the vicuña
to clothe the love affairs, the tombs, the mothers,
the king, the prayers, the warriors.

Here in the high carnivorous lairs the feet of man
rested at night next to the feet of the eagle,
and at dawn
tread with thunderous feet through the rarefied fog,
and touched the soil and the stones
until they could recognize them at night or in death.

I stare at the clothes and the hands,
the trace of water in the echoing hollow,
the wall worn smooth by the touch of a face
that with my eyes stared at the terrestrial lamps,
that with my hands oiled the vanished
timbers: because everything, clothing, skin, jars,
words, wine, bread,
was gone, fallen to the earth.

And the air came in with orange-blossom fingers
over all those asleep:
a thousand years of air, months, weeks of air,
of blue wind, of iron cordillera,
that were like soft hurricanes of footsteps
polishing the lonely boundary of the stone.

From Heights of Machu Picchu: X

“Macchu Picchu, did you place
stone upon stone, and at the base, rags?
Coal above coal, and at the bottom, the teardrop?
Fire into gold, and within it, trembling, the heavy
red raindrop of blood?

“Give me back the slave that you buried!
Shake the hard bread of the wretched poor
out from the ground, show me the servant’s
clothes and his window.
Tell me how he slept when he lived.”

[This poem should be read in its entirety. It is so Neruda – his deep compassion and activism for the poor, and he could feel the lives of the poor that were used to build this “great” civilization.]