somewhere I have to say it: WP e-Commerce is far far the handiest plug-in for shopping, we’ve tried many of them. We went into the code very deep and have been tweeking with it for a while, so I see the inside of it, and I need to say that it has horrible solutions that really don’t comply with WordPress’ motto: Code is Poetry.

Some field names in the database are reserved words, like name, description, or ORDER! This is awful, especially if you back up your database without using quotation marks for the field names. To continue, URL names for products are not stored in the product_list table, but in product_metadata, which is 8 times bigger and it would be absolutely unnecessary to use it for URL parsing. Third big problem: product_order table and item_product_association table hold almost the same information, which is way unnecessary, and is critical if you have over 2000 products. Any of these would result in an F, when examing from a programming language, the code of this plug-in is absolutely not poetry – I am not a poet either, but I see wonderfully constructed plug-ins that are truly pieces of art, and compared, I know what coplies with the geniality of WordPress, and what doesn’t.

Simply said: the best cart plug-in, and still not good enough. I am a WordPress fan, religiously, and would never use Joomla or Drupal instead, but this is the point of view where those content management systems ARE BETTER then WordPress, for fact.

With over 1-2000 products, even with deleted and disabled images, a website’s front-end and even it’s wp-admin slows down so much that it makes me desperately dream about something better, built from ground up.

By an Artist, like so much of those, who publish wonderful plug-ins.

thanks so much for addressing that file to my attention… so I did as you suggested, erased the function you pointed out, and the site loaded thumbnails 10 seconds faster. Unluckily there’s now a layout problem, and it looks like behind the thumbnails there are placeholders saying “no image”. So I had to restore the old grid_display_functions.php

Please take a look at my site http://www.frustone.com , when you have time, and if you want to reply me my email is pg.provenzano@gmail.com

thanks so much for the help so far

PG

http://www.instinct.co.nz/forums/topic.php?id=2949#post-13599

That’s a very astute observation about WP-Ecommerce. I had noticed that it was very slow back when I first wrote about it in 2007. I assumed that it was mainly an issue of code optimization which would eventually happen.

It appears that the performance bottleneck is built in.

You should write to WP-Ecommerce and let them know about this thread and perhaps they can fix WP-Ecommerce for us that it doesn’t try to download all the images right away.

On the other hand, some kind of preload can be very useful as well for catalogues – the issue may just be that people are trying to preload images which are too large.

A programmer would be able to set it up that the images preload as they can without interfering with the loading and performance of the website. If WP-Ecommerce was our plugin, that’s what we would do: regulate the rate and order of image upload.

pg.provenzano@gmail.com

Decent wordpress shopping carts are very scarce. Hopefully we will see more of them come out soon.

Heres one that -

1) Will accept Paypal (website pro, and website standard), Google Checkout, 2CheckOut and Authorize.net

2) Uses your default Paypal settings (not IPN) so you can use it to sell stuff on several sites.

3) Generates hacker-proof download links if you sell digital products.

4) Has built in affiliate management system if you want to run an affiliate program, as well as ad/link tracking.

Will work on just about any web site, not only Wordpress.

http://www.wordpressshoppingcart.info (aff)

Nice blog theme btw, I really like the minimal type themes.

Have a great day.

Alan