{"id":4275,"date":"2020-06-14T17:13:17","date_gmt":"2020-06-14T15:13:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nieuwsmarkt.nl\/?p=4275"},"modified":"2020-06-14T18:22:32","modified_gmt":"2020-06-14T16:22:32","slug":"a-challenging-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nieuwsmarkt.nl\/nl\/blog\/2020\/06\/14\/a-challenging-job\/","title":{"rendered":"Een flinke uitdaging"},"content":{"rendered":"

Een webshop maken, die bij aanvang nog geen betaalfuncties hoeft te te hebben in een meertalige omgeving, is best een uitdaging. Aangevuld met de wens dat alle artikelen vanuit een .csv bestand worden ge\u00efmporteerd.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Creative and Functional design<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Het creatieve- en functionele ontwerp werd opgeleverd in een soort 'work in progress' stappenplan, met enkele wijzigingen gedurende het 'traject'. Het perspectief van de klant was zeer creatief aan de ene kant (ze is een part-time sieraden ontwerper\/maker) en zeer technisch aan de andere kant (ze is een software proces ingenieur in de zware industrie).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The creative design was pre-delivered<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

However it still remains important to keep a tracklist of ‘all things done’ in an overview. Especially to ‘come back later’ if things need to be changed. With a missing functional design you are ‘left on your own’, at the moment the customer requests for something new…… At any random times, even years after the first delivery……<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Themer to ‘prevent’ WooCommerce functions<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

From a plug-ins perspective, making a WooCommerce webshop without being a shop at first, means that Beaver Themer comes in to make to right templates for the shops products overview, the category views and the individual product views. Themer is there to ‘filter out’ all the basket and payment functionality out of WooCommerce, but keeping the possibilities open to add them later, onze online shopping will be requested. It is therefore we made the decission to use WooCommerce from the very first beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Importing a csv file for the products catalogue<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

With about a little less than 80 products the ‘shop’ in rather small, but the client requested to be able to import all products everytime at one, after she would decide to make some changes in a Microsoft Access database enad export that database to a CSV file, to be able to overwrite existing products (if needed) with new data and add new products as soon as they become available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translating with WPML<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The next challenge was to do the import for three languages, Dutch, English and Spanish. As you might know, WPML is a ‘monster’, but still the best tool to make an overall translation of all content ‘elements’ in a WordPress website, including WooCommerce. WPML is not friendly at all from a back-end developing perspective. It became a tool where all kinds of ‘modules’ have been ‘glued to’ the base of WPML. Translating is not as straighforward as you might think. Translating a menu has a different approach compared to translating a Gravity Form, or translating Themer templates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All plug-ins worked pretty well together<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We started the whole project without using WPML, so initally ‘just’ in Dutch, especially to test the ‘products import’. We made the decision to import all records everytime after changing were being applied in the Access database. So untouched records were -re-imported, changed records were updates and new records were added to the products catalogue within WooCommerce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beaver Themer, WooCommerce and WPML (and needed add-ons) all worked very well together for all tasks needed now and to be expected tasks, once a real multilingual webshop will be needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also the CSV import of three language based product catalogues worked well. Only disadvantage was that all three language versions could not be imported at one. We had to do separate badges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WooCommerce more structured<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The latest version<\/a> of WooCommerce (starting at 4.0) was improved a lot after Automattic took the plug-in in their portfolio. The community was not very satisfied after Automattic took over, since they changed a lot about their paid add-on policy, just to make more money. But still, WooCommerce is the ‘unwritten’ standard for a webshop in WordPress environments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The workflow<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We did setup the following worklow. We will limit describing the workflow from the moment we started the project from the ‘building phase’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of Technical design<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The plug-ins we needed:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n