So, just to bring you up to date, Sarah, a client of mine wanted to add a whole bunch of wholesaler functions to her WP e-Commerce store so in Part One we covered some of the plugins required to allow for a new Wholesaler role in her Users list and the addition of functionality to make that user just a little bit special.

To Recap – the issues to address in creating this scenario are -

1. Creating a Wholesaler User Role and managing how to give it particular privileges – see Part One
2. Being able to offer wholesaler discounts on the cost of store items - see Part One
3. Having a payment gateway for wholesalers that allows for deferred payment/COD - see Part One
4. Customising the Registration for to allow for custom fields like store name and address
5. Customising the normal site login page with the Fabrik logo to create a more professional impression [edited: AND setting a re-direct to the Wholesaler Documents page]
6. Creating a way of having content served specifically to wholesalers that isn’t available to ordinary shoppers

So now we get to play with some of the other cool functionality I used to extend the Wholesaler experience for both Sarah and the user.

4. Customising the Registration page to allow for custom fields.

I mentioned Gravity Forms in the previous post as an integral part of this process.  Sarah was already using this plugin because it’s awesome and makes lovely, functional forms really easily. So I was stoked to find that the added functionality we needed was available as an add on and yes, I mentioned also that this add on is only available to users with a Developer license.  (Seriously, it’s so totally worth it, as you’ll see below…)

Install the User Registration Add On (and if you don’t already have Gravity Forms active on your site, you’ll need to install that and activate it first).  

The temptation at this point is to go to the User Registration section of the Forms menu and look at it… there’s nothing to see… you have to create a form first… SO

1. Create a form via the ‘New Form’ link in the Forms dashboard.

These are the fields we created for Sarah – they’re all either Advanced Fields that come pre-configured in Gravity, or Standard Text fields

Form Settings : Wholesaler Registration
Name
Email
Name of your Store/Business 
Store Address
Phone Number
ABN (Australian Business Number)
Website
A little bit about your store (paragraph field).

In the form properties the Description Reads “Thanks for your interest in Fabrik!  Please complete the form below and we’ll be in touch!” and the Confirmation reads “Thanks for contacting us! Your user account has been created.

Once your Wholesaler status has been approved you will be notified by email and will have full wholesale access.

Thanks!

Sarah”

Then create a page for your Registration form and insert the shortcode so that your form is displayed on the published page – I choose title=false because the page name doubles as the form’s title.

And here’s the published page.

This is all pretty standard fare for Gravity Forms. But if it’s not clear, ping me in the comments.

2. Now you go into the User Registration Settings and you map the fields in the form to fields in the database… don’t worry, it’s less complicated than it sounds… On the left of the page are the list of user settings created in your Wholesaler Registration form. On the right are the fields in the database you want to map your form to. Use the + and – buttons in the User Meta section to add or remove fields:

Here’s the screenshot:

There, so now when someone completes the registration form their data gets mapped into the database in a way WordPress understands, and puts it in places we can draw from –  Hurrah!

Two things to note… we’ve set the username to be the client’s email address. It’s basically a safeguard that means we’ll get individual, unique, userids. Also, given that in the form we’ve set the default new user role to Subscriber, Sarah can log in to the back end, approve (or not) the application and upgrade the user role to Wholesaler and send a quick email to notify and welcome them.

5. Creating a custom logo for the login page and redirecting after login.

Given that Sarah’s inviting people to sign up for her site I deemed it necessary to customise the login page… just to make the process look a little bit professional… However, I took the path of least resistance on this one, because there are any number of plugins you can get hold of to really trick out the log in area.  But, given that Sarah’s is a site with a really simple design and a lovely header image all I really wanted to do was use that header as a custom logo.

The first (and simplest) plugin I came across that looked suitable to do so was this one. ‘Login Logo by Mark Jaquith’ free from the WordPress Repository.  All you have to do with it is “drop a PNG file named login-logo.png into your wp-content directory. This simple plugin takes care of the rest, with zero configuration. Transparent backgrounds work best. Keep the width below 326 pixels”.

How easy is that?? BAM… done… next?

Ok, after we’d deployed all of the above we noticed that once a new wholesaler logs in they immediately get redirected to their profile page… and for any new WordPress user it’s not immediately obvious how to get to the main site – So we wanted to make the site redirect to the Wholesaler’s documents page…

Again, there’s a plugin for that…  it’s the charmingly named ‘Peter’s Login Redirect’ and it’s available here. There are a whole bunch of variables you can edit to determine who gets rerouted where… but for our purposes this is what we did. See? Way too easy!!

So now we’ve got wholesaler roles set up, and we’ve got application process underway… we’re on the homeward stretch.  We need to serve the content ONLY to the wholesaling user…

6. Serving content to wholesalers only.

There are two elements required in this section… serving only the right pages to the wholesaler role and selectively showing wholesalers the links to those pages.

First, serving up the right pages is taken care of by the User Role Editor plugin… did you notice which options we selected in part one?  One was Read Private Pages and the other was Read Private Posts… So that makes restricting pages really easy… you just set them to Private…

To restrict the links I’m using widgets.  I started with creating two menus in Appearance » Menus one called wholesalers and the other login.  To the wholesalers menu I added our two private pages.  To the login Menu I added the wholesaler login and the wholesaler application page link.

Then I created added both of these menus as Custom Menu Widgets into my chosen Widget Area

Now, for the piece de resistance… I’m using the plugin Dynamic Widgets to take care of this final little bit of the business of restricting access to these menus … The plugin options are fairly heavy duty in terms of what you can show, where, and to whom, and for that it’s brilliant… however it does require the exercise of a little bit of logic to make sure you get the right widgets showing up on the right pages; trial and error gets one there in the end (just saying).

However, in this case the logic is ridiculously simple…

So access the Dynamic Widgets area either from the Appearance menu or from directly in the widget itself. Just click on the word static in the Wholesale Menu – you’ll be directed to the settings page, so in your specific widget under the Role options set the option ‘Show Widget to Everybody’ to NO with exceptions for Admin and Wholesaler roles like this…

So once that’s done… if someone’s logged in they’ll get to see the wholesale menu…

Custom menu with dynamic placement... Show This widget only to Admin and Wholesaler roles

And in the log in menu make the settings the direct opposite of the above – Set Show Widget to Everybody to YES with exceptions for Admin and Wholesaler… so if they’re logged in as admin or wholesaler they don’t see the login menu but if they’re not, they can log in, or apply for wholesaler status.

Save the options and then click through to your site to try it all out!!!

Right, I think that about sums it up… Sarah now has a site with 2 audiences (well, three if you count the admin) and so far all seems to be working out for everyone concerned!!! I’ll report back if anything comes up or we need to edit the above, but the information should be plenty to get you moving off in the same direction if you need similar functions!

Hopefully it will prove useful out there in WordPress land… Chime in in the comments if you’ve anything to add!

So Sarah, having got the day to day management of the online store running smoothly wants to add her wholesalers into the mix and offer them special pages for their eyes only and discounts on product throughout the whole store.

So where do you go to make that happen?

Before we begin the issues to address are -

1. Creating a Wholesaler User Role and managing how to give it particular privileges
2. Being able to offer wholesaler discounts on the cost of store items
3. Having a payment gateway for wholesalers that allows for deferred payment/COD
4. Customising the Registration for to allow for custom fields like store name and address
5. Customising the normal site login page with the Fabrik logo to create a more professional impression!
6. Creating a way of having content served specifically to wholesalers that isn’t available to ordinary shoppers

It’s a good thing that all of these issues can be addressed using plugins. Here’s the run down on what we already had, and what we’re adding in.

We had.

WP e-Commerce – a shopping cart plugin from Get Shopped – Free
Gold Cart for WP e-Commerce, a commercial add on to spruce up some of the display options and increase access to different payment gateways. Cost $40.00
Dynamic Widgetsfor specifying widget visibility on a per page basis. – Free from the WordPress repository

What we added in.

User Role Editor – Free from the WordPress Repository
WP e-Commerce wholesale pricing from Visser Labs – $60.00
Gravity Forms – Ok, this is the expensive bit, because access to the next item on the list requires the Developer License – $199
Gravity Forms User Registration add on (only available to those with a developer license.. but SO worth it). – see above
Login Logo by Mark Jaquith Free from the WordPress Repository. (I’m keeping it simple)

1. Creating a Wholesaler Role

So, getting all this stuff together isn’t too difficult. I’m assuming you know how to get hold of plugins, either via their websites as above or on the repository. So get a hold of the Wholesaler Role plugin and install, and activate it.

What you will get is a new link in the Users menu predictably ‘User Role Editor’ which takes you to a new options page. Start with creating a new Role (we called ours wholesaler) and then assign the capabilities for that role

Now, I think the default shows the roles as they are written in the code, heck, make it easy on yourself and tick the checkbox marked Show Capabilities in Human Readable form… and then set your Wholesaler role up with the capabilities as follows

So, there you have it, you now actually have a user role called Wholesaler – and if you duck over into the Users menu and select a user you’ll be able to see wholesaler in the dropdown box in which you assign roles to any user in your database.

The options you see here will depend on what level user you are when you're logged in. I'm logged in as an Admin so I can see them all

2. Setting discounts across the store for the wholesaler role.

Now, this isn’t something that is built into WP e-Commerce, the shopping cart that Fabrikstore is using.  Happily though, there’s a custom made plugin for just this requirement available over at Visser Labs.

Install and activate the plugin and  under Settings you’ll notice a new admin option called Wholesale Pricing in the list just above Store settings link. On this page you can edit the prices for any of the roles associated with your site.  Subscriber is the default ordinary shopper user, just in case you wondered.

Set your price, save the changes and move on, nothing else to see here.

3. Adding a Payment Gateway that allows for deferred payment.

Now it took me a while to figure this one out.  And when I did I kicked myself that it was this straightforward.  It requires no add ins or plugins other than what we already had, but trip over to the Store Settings and then the Payments tab.

Sarah’s default gateway is PayPal, that’s been up and running a while. But I hadn’t really considered  that you could have 2 gateways concurrently, nor that the test gateway was all we needed to allow for pay later transactions.  But… a) you can and b) here’s how simple it is…

Activate the Test Gateway and then over over its place in that list of payments in this settings page and a little Edit link will appear… click that and in the right hand panel you’ll see the simple settings you’ll need to edit. Here’s how I set it up for Sarah.

So, now we have a brand new role called wholesaler, they have cheaper prices displayed on each item in the store, and they have their own deferred payment option… We’re off to a cracking start…

However, it’s late here, and while I’m dying to show you the cool stuff I did with gravity forms, I’m just keen to hit schedule on this post and grab some quality pillow time… I’ll give you more tomorrow!!

As it happens this non-performance coincides with the advent of my diving into developing using child themes…

Turns out it only needed a little tweak to perform the way I need it to. I’ll document it here for posterity, and perhaps for someone else’s edification. But what will likely happen is that I’ll end up finding a slicker newer, more up to date plugin and this post will become obsolete…

In any case…

The plugin finds your custom page by picking up the custom coming-soon.php you’ve placed in the current theme directory, but because it’s calling the function get_template_directory to find the above file it expects to find it in the parent theme directory (in most cases for me, Genesis). It’s a simple fix, just change that function to get_stylesheet_directory at line 72.

Instead of this…

		$dir = get_template_directory().'/';

use this

		$dir = get_stylesheet_directory().'/';

Having done that, you can go on and copy your coming-soon.php to your theme directory and have your custom coming soon page display as it was intended. This is my custom page. I have some nice little bits of php that throw in the details of the site I’m working over so I all I have to do is set and forget it…

Oh… you want to know those little bits of php?

Ok… easy…

First up is putting the Blog Name in the Page Title

<!--?php bloginfo('name'); ?--> | Maintenance Page

Second is putting the Stylesheet directory in the img urls so I don’t have to code those every time I upload this coming soon file to a new site.

<img src="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/comingsoon_images/spacer.gif" alt="" width="960" height="36" />

Then there’s the name again

Hi! You have reached <!--?php bloginfo('name'); ?--> - Sorry to have missed you! 

Then there’s the admin email address

Or you can contact us by emailing us at<a href="mailto:<?php bloginfo('admin_email'); ?>"><!--?php bloginfo('admin_email'); ?-->

Oh... wait... you're not sure how to make a php file in the first place? That's easy... create your html page, like you would any other. Replace the relevant bits of code in it with those php tags as above and save it as .php instead of HTML.

Enjoy!

I came away from the conversation frustrated based on the following…(After the preliminary greetings and outline of my request…)

 
Operator says:
  Hi.   [redacted].com.au runs on our Apache server.
Operator says:
  If you're going to use Wpress, you need to move to our Zeus servers.
Operator says:
  Because Wpress runs with PHP
Dee says:
  Joomla Runs with PHP
Dee says:
  and I'm already using WordPress on this site
Dee says:
  so do not make any changes to Zeus
Operator says:
  yes but I recommend that you use ZEUS because it runs flawlessly with it.
Dee says:
  NO
Dee says:
  NO
Operator says:
  But that's still your call 
Operator says:
  YEAH ;D
Dee says:
  Thank you
Operator says:
   

Look, I’m no expert, I don’t know why a host chooses Zeus over Apache but the Joomla site was originally on Zeus and we could never get the url rewrites to work, so on that basis alone I was in no way inclined to change…

Did you see the emoticons? Admittedly I was freaked at her suggestion, but the emoticons did.not.help.

This wasn’t the end of it…

Operator says:
  Okay. So just to inform you. You are allowed 500000mb and You are currently using
  2769mb . 
Dee says:
  that's perfect thank you
Operator says:
  Is there anything else I may help you with Dee? 
Dee says:
  No, that's enough for now, thanks
Operator says:
  So you move it to Zeus now?   Kidding!   Have a great day Dee. 
Dee says:
  Just say no to Zeus...
Dee says:
  thanks
Operator says:
    Have a great day !:D

It took some time for my heart to stop pounding – I was having visions of her there in her cubicle with her finger on the button and could hear myself screaming NOOOOOOOOO into the void.

In any case, given its North American origins it doesn’t come prebuilt with Australian address options… but they do provide the means to create such things… and because I’m such a sweetheart, I’m sharing the code here… so you can use it and so that I don’t have to write it again…

Paste this into your functions.php or your functionality plugin.

// Gravity Forms Custom Addresses (Australia)
add_filter("gform_address_types", "australian_address", 10, 2);

    function australian_address($address_types, $form_id){
$address_types["australia"] = array(
      "label" => "Australia",//labels the dropdown
      "country" => "Australia",//sets Australia as default country
      "zip_label" => "Post Code",//what it says
      "state_label" => "State",//as above
      "states" => array("", "Australian Capital Territory", "New South Wales", "Northern Territory", "Queensland","South Australia", "Tasmania", "Victoria", "Western Australia")
);
return $address_types;
}

There you go, have at it!

*Yes, this is an affiliate link. I am part of a number of affiliate programs, but you can be assured that if I’m using affiliate links on a given product/service that it has my wholehearted support and I’m talking about it because I want to share the love, and if that makes me a little cash on the side, yay. If not, it’s still a great product.

Yep, I know, hard life…

I know that us Antipodeans don’t celebrate Thanksgiving like our American counterparts, but it can’t hurt to be thankful, right? I’m certainly feeling it… thankful for this crazy lifestyle, thankful that NZ and family aren’t far from Sydney and home (yep, home – missing it), thankful to all those who’ve trusted me with their valuable web projects this year, and especially thankful for those who’ve got together with me, hung out and talked web, WordPress and life in places like Melbourne, Sydney, the Gold Coast and now Wellington in 2011!  It’s been a pretty fantastic year and I can’t help feeling there’s more amazing stuff to come.

So, though it feels to me to be early to be thinking about Christmas and the New Year… (I can’t quite fathom that it’s Dec 1 tomorrow… ) I’m looking back at 2011, and posting again the [updated] advent calendar that was an old university project from a few years back. The kids (big AND small) in my world ask for it year after year…

So, here you go… a link to the Advent Calendar with a wish that for you and your family, the countdown to the festive season, and the annual Summer (yes, antipodean holiday season comes with sun, sand and the beach) Holidays is one that is fun, and relaxed and more than just a little bit special!!

First… the Slides!

Here is the Getting to Grips with Genesis – talk Outline – if you were there, tell me how close I got!! I’ve certainly read them often enough, I think! I should know them inside out!

Second – the quick review of the back end [ooh er Mrs.] – Just screenshots, but you’ll get the idea.

OK, now we get to the REAL reason you’re here… because you’re looking for resources…
First, if you want to make sense of the resources, you need to get Genesis… help a girl out and pick it up via this link StudioPress Themes for WordPress – or the one over there in the right hand column of the page… there’s a good chap!  then, when you’ve got it installed, come back here…

…s’ok… I can wait…

…

Thanks

Now, here’s where you go to learn all about it…

1. Predictably, Studiopress have great Developer Resources - and a very active forum (that you can access completely when you’ve purchased the framework).
2. Nick the Geek has an incredibly comprehensive series of Genesis tutorials called ‘Genesis Explained‘ which I refer to constantly. He’s also put together a matrix of available Genesis themes for comparing what you need with what’s out there… free AND premium themes – Take a Look.
3. Chris Cochran published this Visual Hook Guide that is my ‘go to’ resource, everytime I’m doing something new – if you wanted to know where the ‘lego bumps’ are… this is the easy way to find out, in fact, Chris’ whole site Genesis Tutorials is fantastic.
4. Bill Erickson publishes great tutorials and shares heaps of code snippets, some of which I’ve tweaked to suit themes I’m building – (with a little help from my php guru friends). There’s way more on Google, as well.

In terms of finding Child Themes -

1. you can start, of course, with Studiopress - and their marketplace for 3rd party designed themes.
2. Then trip on over to the aforementioned Theme Matrix at Designs by Nick the Geek…
3. and the… you know, ask Google
4. - and if you’re a designer wanting to put your design into Genesis… message me… maybe we could do it together!

The other thing I mentioned in the talk were the Simple Plugins – these are a few of them and there are a whole lot of Genesis Specific plugins on the Plugin Repository, and I only use them on an as and when needed basis, not a big fan of chunking up an install with heaps of plugins… BUT… Simple Hooks is awesome for adding bits of code on hooks without having to write to the Functions file. Simple Edits gets a bit of a workout too – just to tweak the footer contents and some of the other basic site elements.
Genesis Simple Hooks
Genesis Simple Edits
Genesis Simple Comments
Genesis Simple Breadcrumbs
Genesis Simple Menus

So, there you have it. If you’ve come up with any questions, don’t hesitate to put them in the comments, let’s carry on the conversation, I love talking about this stuff!

Now… did you see that? That attitude is exactly why, while I got a lot out of WordCamp Melbourne, I didn’t get more. I spent too much time intimidated by how much everybody else seemed to know… and by the fact that they all seemed to know everybody else… So, here I am 9 months later – going to WordCamp Gold Coast  as a speaker… and before I do go, I thought I’d give you a couple of keys to getting the most out of WordCamp when 1. you’re not really sure what you’re you’re doing there, 2. you’re not sure if you really know anything about WordPress, or 3. you’re not really sure you know anything about anything… BUT you’ve booked your ticket, you’ve scabbed a bunk off a friend’s friend who’s doing Arts at Bond and has a spare sofa and some pot-noodles and you’re counting down till your Tiger Qantas flight takes you to the Coast (and you booked a day early, just in case Tiger Qantas has industrial action or technical difficulties).

So, here we go… Welcome to WordCamp.

Key number 1. Talk to people. Connect, don’t be intimidated, everyone is stoked to be there because they all love WordPress like you do… they like talking about it… so engage in conversation, ask questions, I’ve found that no one is beyond answering n00b questions, and if they are, ask someone else… but we’ve all been n00bs at sometime… I was a n00b in February… I mean, I sat in a talk and the guy next to me sketched out what a child theme was on a sheet of paper so I’d get what the speaker was on about (and now I’m talking about child themes at WordCamp… cool huh?!). And if you don’t know what a child theme is, come find me, I’ll tell you all about it.

Key number 2. Follow the conversation and CONTRIBUTE to it on Twitter. The Web Princess brand was pretty much launched at WordCamp Melbourne with a whole flurry of action on Twitter and 4square while I live tweeted sessions I was attending. Twitter adds a great dynamic to the event – it’s such fun to be chatting to people about what you’re hearing while you’re listening to the speaker, and it’s really encouraging for the speaker to see people engaged with their content and to follow up and chat about it afterwards. Twitter is also a great ‘low-key’ way to ‘meet’ people when maybe walking up to them and baldly introducing yourself to them might be intimidating… AND, once the event is over, keep the conversation going… my anticipation of this WordCamp is actually all about connecting up with people I’ve been tweeting with all year. And if you want to tweet my session? My twitter handle is @thewebprincess

Key number 3. Take notes. Seriously, there are SO many sessions and so many ‘ah hah’ and ‘oh WOW’ moments in the course of a day that it can be really difficult to remember come the next week back at the office, which plugin it was that did that thing you really need, right now. You’ll rack your brains trying to shake loose from your mind which speaker mentioned it so you can go back to the video but it’s evaporated, and while you’ll really want to watch ALL those videos again to try and find that awesome plugin, you also have to spend time doing all the rest of your life that you do… so it will go by the wayside until a meetup when someone gets up and talks about it and you think “Finally! THAT was the plugin* I was looking for, that time”…

Not that I’m speaking from experience… or anything…

There you have it… for me, just those three things sum up how I plan ‘to WordCamp’ on the Gold Coast … engage with the others there, engage with the twitterverse and engage with the content… it’s like anything really, the more engaged you are, the more you get out of it…

I am SO looking forward to seeing you there! PLEASE come and say Hi (and while I may go by the name The Web Princess, it’s ok… you don’t have to curtsey or anything… just calling me “Your Highness” will do).

*ManageWP

The book is called ‘Living with a Creative Mind‘ and it’s a handbook for creatives on how to manage our internal worlds and to provide understanding for those who live/work/hang out with us who may not see the world in quite the same way as we artistic types do. In all it’s a book about being able to live a long healthy creative life with strong healthy relationships. And frankly, it’s absolutely fascinating.

Jeff and Julie Crabtree the authors are an interesting mix, Jeff a highly artistic musician, producer, teacher and now author lives life out on the extremes of creativity, which over the years has proved both interesting and challenging for Julie a psychologist whose view of the world is much more scientific in its approach.

Both Jeff and Julie have had the opportunity to observe and analyse not only their relationship, but also to observe the inner workings of other creative people in their roles as educators. Jeff as the principal of a performing and creative arts college for and Julie as a counselor, a phD researcher, and also as principal of a counseling college. Added to that, the years of living together, negotiating, navigating and nurturing their relationship, I believe, makes them incredibly well qualified to speak in this area, and having studied under Jeff for a number of years, I can attest to value, personally, of what they’ve learned.

So, if you’re in any way creative, work with creatives, or have creatives in your family I strongly encourage you to check out this book. Their website is http://livingwithacreativemind.com – if you like them on facebook at http://facebook.com/livingwithacreativemind you can get access to a free copy of the first chapter to whet your appetite.

Finally, here’s a video to give you a bit more insight…