Ask SkyVerge

How to Add Content Below WooCommerce Featured Image

Here’s a tiny snippet based a question from Julie: How can I add a notice right below the WooCommerce featured image on the product page? It should say “click to enlarge” right below the image. There’s an action that you can use to add content below featured images, which can be used before or after product thumbnails. The woocommerce_product_thumbnail action is what will help us out. Let’s add a notice that says, “Click to Enlarge”…

Read More

Changing WooCommerce Custom Order Status Icons

If you’re using the official WooCommerce iPhone app, you may have noticed that custom order statuses have their own icon when displayed in your order details: These handy little icons (designed by Jay Koster) can be added to your WooCommerce “Orders” page as well so they’re consistent throughout your shop and the app. Here’s a quick guide on how to add WooCommerce custom order status icons. You don’t have to be using the iPhone app…

Read More

WordPress plugins vs themes

Why Use Plugins Instead of Theme Changes?

Since we develop a lot of plugins (mostly for WooCommerce) and do some custom development, we get a lot of questions on best practices or recommendations for adding functionality to a site. Many times we’ll provide suggestions or guidance and tell people they should create a custom plugin, which prompts the question, “Couldn’t I just modify my theme template or buy a theme with this built-in this instead? I don’t want to have too many…

Read More

Guide for Upgrading to WooCommerce 2.1

WooCommerce 2.1 was released on Monday, and makes several changes to the core plugin. As a result, you may experience issues when upgrading if you don’t pay attention to a few of the changes. The guide that follows is a general overview of some things to look out for when upgrading to WooCommerce 2.1 to make the transition from WooCommerce 2.0 as smooth as possible. There are a couple of known issues that are being…

Read More

WordPress development tutorials

Don’t Share Terms Between WordPress Taxonomies

By default WordPress will reuse terms with the same name and slug between different taxonomies (at least for now). For instance, if you add the term ‘red’ as a tag, and then add the category ‘red’, the same wp_terms record will be shared between them. This is also true for any custom taxonomies you define (remember that despite their seeming differences, WordPress tags and categories are both implemented as taxonomies). Now, in general this is…

Read More

SkyVerge WooCommerce Extensions

WordPress Pretty Category Permalinks Broken and Fixed

This is probably another one of those situations that applies only to me, but just in case someone else out there happens to have this same broken permalink issue, I’ll describe what happened to my site, and how I fixed it. The specifics of my setup were: WordPress 3.4.1, WordPress SEO 1.2.5, and the custom permalink structure /%category%/%postname%/. The problem that someone thankfully alerted me to (gotta get back in the habit of checking Google…

Read More

WP Development

Debugging WordPress

The following are some techniques I use nearly every day for debugging WordPress and WooCommerce, and can be used for plugin or theme development equally. Echoing or printing to the screen will only get you so far when debugging, especially in a complex framework like WordPress; to really understand the code flow, and to trace and fix issues, you need to be able to log messages to a file. For this WordPress makes use of…

Read More

Exclude Your Traffic From Jetpack Site Stats

I recently installed Jetpack by WordPress, solely because I wanted to use Site Stats, and even that I wanted mostly so that I could see my site traffic in the WordPress iPhone app. I quickly realized that Site Stats was tracking my own internal page views as I browsed around skyverge.com, throwing off my true page view/visitor numbers. Site Stats comes with some built in ability to exclude site traffic, but I found I needed…

Read More

Double Notification and Comment Emails Explained

I finally took the time to investigate why I receive two notification emails each time a comment is posted at this blog. Granted, it didn’t hurt anything, but it was annoying to get the multiple emails on my iPhone. Initially I assumed the issue had something to do with my use of the WP-Mail-SMTP plugin (which I highly recommend if you want to use GMail to send your emails from WordPress), however it turned out…

Read More

How to Exclude Traffic From Google Analytics in Magento

The Problem There are two typical ways of stopping your internal requests from appearing in and skewing your Google Analytics metrics. Both are outlined in this article from Google, but they boil down to two options: Filter by IP Filter by cookie Both are ok choices, but the first becomes unmanageable without a static IP, and doesn’t fit the laptop-based mobile development style that I prefer; and the second relies upon your ability to set…

Read More