You can grab the update from your Shopp Update Settings or use your original purchase receipt to download. If you need to can look-up your order receipt from http://shopplugin.net/store/account/

WordPress 2.8 Integration

While Shopp 1.0.5 brought official WordPress 2.8 support, 1.0.6 takes it even further. Shopp takes advantage of the new JavaScript optimizations in WordPress 2.8, improving overall speed of your administration experience.

With 1.0.6 we also converted all of the Shopp widgets to the new Widget API while providing backwards compatibility with the old widget approach for WordPress 2.6 and 2.7. In addition, we’ve added the new Category Section and Product widgets.

The Category Section widget will provide a navigation menu of all of the categories related (as in a sub-category or parent category) to the current category being browsed. Keep in mind, this only works when browsing the Shopp-powered dynamic catalog, not when putting Shopp categories in a static WordPress page.

The Product widget gives you a way to highlight a specific product or a set of products from a specific category in the widget supported areas of your theme’s layout.

More Power and Flexibility

The API has been further refined with new template tags and template tag options, including new smart categories and alphabetic category pagination. All of it designed to make it easier than ever to showcase products the way you (or your client) want to.

Shopp 1.0.6 includes the new Catalog Products and Related Products smart categories. Hello cross-selling and upselling!

The Catalog Products smart category provides the simplest method of showing all of the products in your entire catalog. With Related Products, you can now include a single tag in your product template to automagically show products related to the one being viewed.

The Help Desk

Since the initial release, Shopp’s community has been expanding rapidly and we’re in the midst of natural growing pains associated with a successful project that is gaining momentum. Aside from ensuring the platform is the best available, we also want the support experience to be the best out there.

Our first step in tackling that has been launched as the new Shopp Help Desk. The Help Desk is a custom issue tracking system that will allow our support team to more efficiently handle your questions and troubleshooting issues so we can keep people from slipping through the cracks.

It’s just one more way we’re working to make Shopp the best platform for e-commerce development.

More to come…

All in all, Shopp 1.0.6 includes over 65 new features, changes and fixes. For details, read the entire list of changes.

Looking ahead, we still have 1.0.7 on the horizon that will include some new payment gateways added into the core, providing even more payment options out-of-the-box. Also, look for new shipping calculator add-ons and payment gateway add-ons in the near future. And of course, 1.1 is well into the design phase and will represent the largest scale of development since release, including support for some of the most asked for features. We’re still looking for a few good developers that can help with testing releases, so if you think you have the right stuff, join the beta team.

We use Shopp to sell our online course, book, classes and audio book. We also use it to offer promotions, discounts and more.

Shopp was pretty much perfect from the second it was uploaded to our blog. The only change made was the style of the buttons. Runs on PayPal Pro gateway flawlessly.

The site uses the PayPal Website Payments Pro gateway. ChurchRoot is ready for the upcoming Shopp Account features, but is functioning just fine without them for now. My favorite “feature” of Shopp is the support! If you’ve tried other WordPress ecommerce solutions you’ll know what I mean! The forums are great!

On the shipping front, USPS is nearly complete and CA Post Sell Online services are started and well under way with release within the next couple of weeks. With that attention turns to the pure maintenance release of 1.0.6 which will address bugs in 1.0.5 most of them small and not critical, but none-the-less still annoying to deal with.

WordCamp Shopp Meet-up

Finally, for anyone around Ohio, I will be attending WordCamp Columbus on May 16th, of which Shopp is a Gold Sponsor. If you’re planning on attending, please drop me a line in the comments and let me know. I’d love to meet anyone who can make it for an informal Shopp meetup!

You can get the update using Shopp’s built-in auto-update system. Or if that fails you, you can always download updates using the download link available in your original purchase receipt. Login to your account to lookup your past orders. When upgrading manually, be sure to deactivate Shopp in your WordPress install first, upload and replace all files, then re-activate Shopp.

If there is one word to describe everything happening in 1.0.5 it’s polish. There’s a lot going on in 1.0.5. New features and enhancements have been included to fill out missing functionality. A ton of refinements both functionally, but also in architecture and organization make this version the most efficient yet.

Here are the highlights of what’s new in this release:

• Customer-defined donation amounts (variable donations)
• Date-based order filters
• Purchase log downloads in Tab, CSV and Microsoft Excel formats
• Printable orders using your receipt template
• Duplicate products feature
• New customizable administrative user interfaces for WordPress 2.7+
• Compatibility with WordPress 2.8
• Database and query optimizations for faster response and better scaling across very large catalogs
• New tags and tag options to make the template API even more powerful
• New error logging and notification system
• Product and category editing “workflows” feature – you have to use it to believe it
• Fixes for bugs in version 1.0.4 including: hidden empty categories in the admin, broken category product-templates, enhanced permalink implementation for better SEO, catalog page titles fix, subcategory tag issues, broken Google Checkout callback generator

The biggest improvement by far is the new administrative interfaces for the product, category and promotion editors that take advantage of the new user interface customization capabilities that were introduced with the WordPress 2.7 releases. You can now collapse panels you don’t need, drag them around to re-organize for your editing process and even remove panels you don’t use at all.

All in all, this release represents some subtle but significant steps forward in making Shopp an even more robust and reliable platform for developing and running online stores. I hope you enjoy it! And please, feel free to leave your comments to let everyone know your favorite new feature or refinement.

We’re starting to settle in to a release schedule of a new minor point release every month. I think a month between releases is a fair schedule to maintain in getting fixes and smaller enahncements out to the Shopp community. It’s also enough time to ensure the updates are solid enough for production use.

The biggest advancements coming in 1.0.5 include:

• Customer-defined donation amounts (variable donations)
• A fix for slow query performance on stores with a large product dataset
• Major speed optimizations for the category products query (the core query)
• A new error system that enables error logging and e-mail notification for transaction errors to aide in fixing problems and errors faster and easier
• Duplicate products feature – complete product copies
• A re-imagined interface design for WordPress 2.7 with better visual distinction between sections of input and support for a configurable interface (collapsing sections and dragging them around)
• Workflow support for the product and category editors to make management faster and easier than ever – use it and you’ll see what I mean
• A new search shopp() tag to “force” store searches or blog searches
• New options for a variety of tags to make the shopp() tags API more flexible
• Some admin restructuring that cleans up the codebase and makes things easier to maintain (less bugs and faster bug fixes)
• Better support for different models of remote checkout processes
• Fixes for the killer bugs of 1.0.4 including the missing categories in the category manager
• Support for easily overriding Thickbox image zoom
• Customer account management interfaces (and templates) when the Shopp account system is enabled

So, with all this coming to 1.0.5, it begs the question: what’s left out? Unfortunately, I’m kicking the can down the road in supporting Manual Payments, Bank Transfers, COD and other deferred payment situations. It’s not a matter of not wanting to implement them. In fact it is the opposite. Because I take it so seriously, it is a matter of a careful development approach that provides a comprehensive solution, not a quick fix. The re-engineering effort required to acheive these features is non-trivial and rather than introduce new instability and delay 1.0.5 further, we’re choosing to wait for 1.0.6 and get it done right – with the entire focus of the 1.0.6 release on the revised payment systems architecture. So for those of you waiting for these features, I’m afraid your wait will be a little longer, but worth it in the end.

The 1.0.5 release is still looking like it will be an impressive update to Shopp. It continues to show a commitment to quality updates that make it worthwhile to invest in the Shopp e-commerce platform to begin with.

So far, Shopp has been limited to setting a donation amount that donors would add to their cart. This meant that offering different donation amounts required the use of product variations. Upcoming in 1.0.5, the donation system has been greatly enhanced to include support for variable donation amounts. Now you can allow your donors to specify custom amounts and even use the amount you set in the product editor as a required minimum donation amount. The great news is, it doesn’t require any alteration to your templates to use this functionality.

There are several bugs unrelated to the donations system that need addressed before 1.0.5 can be released. Still, you can look forward to seeing the update in the next couple weeks or so as our pre-release team has a chance to work with it and verify the fixes.

In addition to using CSS, Shopp template tags, and a touch of javascript, we required some modifications to the Shopp plugin to get the final result that we were going for. These modifications included the integration of variation controls and the “add to cart” button directly within the catalog page. The JS I mentioned, allowed us to apply special styles to product rows depending on how many items were in each row (we used jQuery). Working with Shopp was a great experience. We also owe a big thanks to Jon Davis, the developer of Shopp. He really goes above and beyond! – Dave and Chris from GoMedia.us on behalf of Ballher.com