I have sites with instant loading pages, although once you add this plugin to the site you’ll start seeing 5-20 second page load times. This is a major turn-off for customers…

I think a blindfolded monkey banging on a keyboard would create better code than the WP E Commerce plugin. I advise you to avoid this plugin like the plague–the core code is written poorly by people who clearly don’t know what they are doing.

If it weren’t for the extremely slow loading times using this plugin I would give it 5 stars.

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.getshopped.org/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