This is just a quick blog post to clear up a very easy situation to deal with in wp ecommerce 3.8. I’m doing myself no favours by posting it – I can not charge you the minimum charge for 5 minutes work. But it is a question that keeps popping up on forums and requests for work.
Changing the store category order in wp ecommerce widget.
The question is how to change the order of categories in the sidebar widget in WordPress wp-ecommerce 3.8. I keep seeing questions about how to change the code or rewrite the php to change the order that the categories are displayed in. There’s no need to change any code at all. There really is a very simple solution using WordPress.
If you are using the latest version of WordPress just use the custom menu function. On your widget page you will see a custom menu widget that you can drop into you sidebar – it’s much easier than trying to recode the widget itself, it’s not susceptible to being overwritten when you upgrade wp-ecommerce 3.8 and it is simply drag and drop.
To use it go to the appearance section and click on menu. In the main screen click on the little + sign and name your menu. Save the menu.
One the left hand menu scroll down the page until you come to the shop categories section and click on show all. Then just click on all the shop categories that you want displayed in thr sidebar and click add to menu.
Use custom menu facility and just drag and drop store categories.
On the main screen you can now just drag and drop the store categories into any order you want. to make sub categories just drag it to indent under the parent category. After you’ve set it all up click save menu.
Now just go to appearance and widgets. Drag the custom menu widget into the sidebar and in the drop down menu select the name of the menu and save.
There you have it – your wp ecommerce store categories in the sidebar widget showing in exactly the order that you want them to without doing anything to the code.
If you add more categories or delete some you just go back to appearance > menus, select the relevant menu and make any changes that you need to.
Don’t just think to change code when adapting plugins.
Sometimes when you want to make changes to a plugin – not just wp ecommerce 3.8 – you need to think a little outside the box and don’t just assume that to make changes to a plugin requires you to make changes to the plugin code.
The custom menu function is just another reason why WordPress is such a powerful and useful content management system. It’s not for no reason that over 50% of the worlds top 100,000 web sites now rely on WordPress to deliver the content.
