I am currently in the middle of developing quite an extensive and complicated record label website that uses post types and a whole bunch of relationship mapping to map post types to one another.
Part of the major functionality of the site is a store. Because I have an “Artists” post type called “artists” I would like to use a store plugin that offers variations as I will be dealing with physical and digital music sales, as well as selling merchandise and would like to use a plugin that takes advantage of custom post types.
I would like to be able to relate one or more items to a particular artist in the “artist” post type so that I don’t have to make the client enter the artists names again, thus having to different locations storing the same data.
I’ve taken a look at MarketPress created by WPMU Dev, but it seems as though support for variations isn’t quite there yet.
WP E-Commerce 3.8 (currently in beta) by Instinct supposedly uses custom post types, but to me it doesn’t appear to be using custom post types whatsoever, but rather it’s own interface.
I also tried PHPPurchase as well, but out-of-the-box it uses pages instead of post types. I did find a tutorial telling you how to supposedly use custom post types with it, but it hardly seemed like true post type integration, the tutorial is located here.
If you have a way I can relate my artists post type to any pre-existing shop plugins for WordPress, that would be awesome too and I wouldn’t mind having to add in different code to relate the two.
Commercial and free solutions welcomed.
1 Answer
You Should look at dukapress it a fairly new E-Commerce plugin
but its loaded with features and it uses Custom post types.
and as for the relation part, i had that same challenge as your are having in developing a site for one of my customers, i needed to relate a CPT (custom post type) named “Question”
to Groups of CTP named “Answer” so i could display all answers of a question in the same page as the question itself and i ended up doing like this
for each answer i added a custom field named “Q_ID” an just set its value to the corresponding Question Post type ID.
made things real easy as far as using query_posts or a custom WP_Query cant remember and only selecting posts of type “Answer” with Custom Filed named Q_ID that equals to my Question Post Type ID.
$q= array(
"POST_TYPE"=>'Answer',
'meta_key' =>'Q_ID',
'meta_compare' => '='
'meta_value' => $Questions_Post_TYPE_ID
);
query_posts($q);
hope this helps.