Building a Shopping Site from Open Source

July 12, 2016 blog

640px-Colourful_shopping_carts

Image attribution

By Jim (http://www.flickr.com/photos/alphageek/121953651) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Tasked with building a shopping site for the 24/7 Strings venture, I had the freedom to choose whatever tools that was needed, given these requirements:

  1. PHP
  2. MySQL
  3. Bulk import of products

The PHP and MySQL requirements are based on the resources available from the hosting provider. Since there will hundreds of products, I needed a way to load and reload products from a spreadsheet.

I have been using WordPress for many years as the platform for any web site. My options are to use either a dedicated shopping platform or a WordPress plugin that provided the shopping functionality. I am pleased to discover the WordPress plugin WooCommerce. The core WooCommerece plugin is free, while extensions and premium themes are paid. I was able to build the site using only free plugins and the free Storefront theme.

List of plugins used