Essential WooCommerce Compatibility Changes Needed

[Ben]

Suggestions for theme improvements for WooCommerce usefulness. Boss is a FANTASTIC theme. The best I’ve ever used. Until you use WooCommerce with it. And I do use WooCommerce with it, and the buyers get quite confused because the layout needs some love. 😉 Suggestions in no particular order:

1.) Related Products: It will only show 2 products with add to cart buttons that stretch half the page. It’s a lot of dead white space. If you use the Woo filter:

function woocommerce_output_related_products() {
woocommerce_related_products(4,4); // Display 4 products in 4 columns
}

….then it gets even worse. Generally, you’d want to have 4 related products with 4 columns here. It seems to be css hard coded to only use two columns and it really just looks bad. Related products show up on single product pages, at the bottom.

2.) Category display for the shop. [product_categories number=”12″ parent=”0″] is the standard shortcode to display your stores product categories. The display seems to be missing any useful CSS to make it theme friendly. Basically, the layout is so terrible that it’s a useless shortcode, and there’s no other easy way to add a product category list to a homepage. I haven’t investigated the other shortcodes that are included with WooCommerce, but it’d be a good idea to check on those too for styling decisions: ( http://docs.woothemes.com/document/woocommerce-shortcodes/ )

3.) Search. What….the……hell…….. 😉 Have you seen how search results are for WooCommerce products? Ouch. Images terrible and grainy. Really nasty stuff. The layout for search is completely incompatible with a WooCommerce store. An theme option to search only products, and when doing so, give it a correct layout such as the layout that would be shown when viewing a product categories product listings. 2, 3, or 4 column output as an option or a filter is essential for search.

4.) Pagination — When you have 10,000 products, pagination is cute, but not too functional. 1…2…3…4…….100…101…102 is nice, but where is the place to type in a page number and click go? Most customers wont be smart enough to change it in the URL. Just changing the center dots to allow page number and hit enter would be sufficient.

5.) woocommerce.php. We discussed this a little bit in another thread. Woocommerce.php means you can not customize archive-products.php at all. It will cause a lot of plugins to break, and is really just a hack for quick theme compatibility. While it makes the theme compatible, it doesnt make plugins that use the Woo hooks/filters/actions to fire, essentially breaking a lot of plugins. Time to template out the /boss/woocommerce/ folder for complete WooCommerce compatibility.

That’s about it for now. If more comes up I’ll post up here. 🙂 There’s some other tweaks that would be neat to have, but nothing terribly complex or important. The ones I’ve outlined here, however are “make it or break it” functionality.

Cheers

Ben

[Sol Huebner]

Hi Ben,

some nice suggestions in here 🙂

Kind regards