In the process of upgrading a test e-Commerce website I came across a small issue with the WordPress SEO Plugin by Joost de Valk and the WP e-Commerce Plugin by Instinct Entertainment / GetShopped.
The site was running with the following software versions, WordPress 3.5.52 (http://wordpress.org), shopping cart WP e-Commerce 3.8.8.5 (http://getshopped.org/), SEO plugin WordPress SEO 1.2.8.7 (http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/), and the Elegance Theme 1.4.5 (http://storefrontthemes.com/) in a custom grid view.
After updating to WordPress SEO 1.4.13 the WP e-Commerce Products Page on the website was blank / empty except for the header (with menus/navigation), the footer and sidebar. No products were displayed and no “Products Page” banner was displayed – the Products Page was effectively empty.
All the WP e-Commerce category pages, and individual product pages were correctly showing the products. We had a look for differences between the working pages and the non-working Products Page and saw that there was one apparent difference.
It appears that the WPEC blank Products Page was occurring on our test site because the Products Page in WordPress did not have a meta description set by us.
After entering a meta description and publishing the update the Products Page on the website correctly displayed the sites product grid view. I don’t know if the root cause of this issue lies with the WordPress SEO plugin, the WPEC plugin or the Elegance theme but the circumvention is thankfully nice and easy.
Just really can’t believe the fact that we are still relying on rules-based SEO plug ins. Only I’ve found until now is something called INK for All. So I haven’t been using INK long, but it’s already helping me improve the quality of my writing and give me back hours and hours of time. Have you tried it?