This post offers a short review of our recent experience using the WP Shopping Cart Addon for the NextGEN Gallery.

The addon is a WordPress plugin (WP Simple Paypal Shopping cart) and a template file which allows you to add to your NextGEN gallery a simple shopping cart function to sell items.

Basically it provides the ability to set a price, a product description and an Add to Cart button which then appear in the caption for the NextGEN thumbnail/s. The user can Add to Cart any number of items then go to the Checkout page to review their selections and complete their payment in PayPal.

We’re not going to describe how to setup the shopping cart as that is well documented here http://www.wordpress-ecommerce.com/wordpress-shop-using-nextgen-gallery-and-wp-shopping-cart-7.

WP Shopping Cart is simple to install and easy to use, however, there are some things to be aware of.

The WP Shopping Cart Template.
The template is invoked by using shortcode [nggallery id=nn template=wp-eStore] on a gallery page (or post) and adding shortcode [wp_cart:the-product-name:price:the-product-price:end] in the Description field for the image.

Using the wp-eStore template makes the Description of the image it’s Caption and causes the Add to Cart button to appear as part of the thumbnail caption in grid view.

Whilst this is consistant with NextGEN’s – in our opinion, flawed – handling of using the Description for the Caption it can be problematic for two reasons.

(1) If like our client you use long Descriptions then that screws up the grid view appearance. The image below shows a simple version of this problem from our test site, the left hand thumbnail is what you get if you use short Descriptions, the right hand thumbnail is what you get with longer Descriptions. Our clients desciptions are in fact MUCH longer and MUCH wider than the sample shown and contain HTML formatting.

(2) If you’ve customised your NextGEN code (eg. gallery-caption.php) to facilitate having short captions and long descriptions by using the “Alt & Title Text” field (variable ‘alttext’) as the Caption rather that using the “Description” (variable ‘description’) field then the WP Shopping Cart template nullifies that change for any gallery its used on.

Essentially you can’t have long descriptions if you wish to use the WP Shopping Cart template and maintain a sensible grid view appearance. This is not a fault with the cart plugin but is unfortunately how NextGEN works by default.

WP Shopping Cart page corruption.
Most NextGEN gallery implementations work by displaying a group of thumbnails, the user clicks on one and the full size image for the thumbnail is displayed.

Our clients NextGEN galleries work slightly (and very usefully) differently to the norm. When you click on a thumbnail, you are taken to a page (generated by NextGEN) that shows a larger image and description of the image with details like the artist name, year it was taken, edition details (if applicable) and so on. Clicking on the larger image then takes you to the full sized image.

This ‘middle page’ is slightly corrupted by the WP Shopping Cart addon whereby the Add to Cart botton appears both above and below the image and the top one includes some extraneous visible HTML like characters. The image below shows an example of this (nb. the picture itself was shrunk by me to reduce the file size to make it more viewable).

WP Shopping Cart Addon and the WordPress Gallery System.
Although the WP Shopping Cart NextGen Gallery AddOn says “NextGEN Gallery” you can actually use it anywhere by installing plugin part and ignoring the NextGEN template for it. Then just put the [wp_cart…] shortcode on any page or post or other gallery you like.

We tested WP Shopping Cart Addon using the standard WP gallery system using the [wp_cart…] shortcode. It worked much better for us there than with NextGEN as WordPress uses Captions as Captions and Descriptions as Descriptions so it works perfectly.

The first image below shows an example WP gallery setting for an image using the [wp_cart…] shortcode, the second image shows the thumbnail grid view with Add to Cart button display and the final image shows what you see when a grid view thumbnail is clicked – very nice. This is really how NextGEN should work!

Summary.
Overall the WP Shopping Cart Addon for the NextGEN Gallery works well for those gallery sites that use short Descriptions and where clicking a thumbnail takes you directly to the full size image. For the rest of us there are problems as note above. It works very well with the standard WordPress gallery system.

I expect the long Description problems are not easily solvable. Potentially NextGEN could be enhanced to allow shortcodes (eg [wp_cart…]) to be used in the “Alt & Title Text” field and fixed to correctly use the “Alt & Title Text” as the thumbnail caption. WP Shopping Cart could then be updated to also use the “Alt & Title Text” as its thumbnail captions. I might get keen and raise a bug report on the Caption/Description issue with NextGEN.