If you have read my other post on how to turn your wordpress site into a digital photo store you should already know how to integrate Nextgen gallery plugin with eStore to sell photos from your blog. Nextgen gallery plugin allows you to show all the photos in a nice grid view on a page or post. But you just don’t want to create a photo gallery for other people to view. You also want to sell the photos. That is why you need to have a shopping cart plugin like eStore who offers integration with nextgen gallery plugin.
From my experience, sometimes I’ve heard users having trouble with integration. It’s fairly easy if you follow the detailed documentation.
Most of the time the issue was -
1. Rendering of template gallery-wp-eStore.php failed.
2. gallery is not loading on the page or post.
And the reasons for this issue -
1. In nextgen gallery and eStore integration we need to upload a eStore template file in the “view” directory of nextgen gallery plugin which is not there.
2. After you update a new version of nextgen gallery plugin you need to put that tempalte file back to the “view” directory again.
3. Typing mistake in the shortcode or using wrong shortcode for showing gallery.
Once you successfully integrate nextgen gallery with eStore you will be able to show “Add to Cart” button bellow each image which will look similar like below -
But what if you want to show the gallery in a nicer way? you can’t get anything better than the above display with this integration as nextgen gallery and eStore is two different plugins and eStore can’t change the way nextgen gallery displays the gallery. Well, we can make eStore alone display the images in a fancier way. Lets have a look at the following product display -
You can show the above image display using the fancy6 shortcode of eStore which is nicer than the previous display with nextgen gallery plugin. Now if you can show the photo products in a beautiful grid view then why wouldn’t you use only one plugin? you won’t have to bother about any integration and also you will get a good display with payment button.
How to Implement the fancy display
1. First, upload and install eStore plugin.
2. Now configure the basic settings of eStore (On your dashboard go to eStore->Settings)
4. Go to “categories” under eStore and create a new category. Remember the ID of the category you just created.
4. Go to “Add/Edit product” under eStore and enter all the product details. Save the product. In this way create as many products you want. Dont forget to enter a Thmbnail image URL for the product (this thumbnail will be shown with each product). Also you need check the Product Category while creating each product ( which category you want to include this product to).
5. Now create a post or page and use the following shortcode for showing products from a particular category with fancy6-
Where id=The ID of the category you created before, style=The fancy display type
So the above shortcode will show all the products from category id 1 with fancy display 6
You also need to place the following shortcode on this page to show the items in the cart once Add to Cart button is clicked-
Please note that you will need the free extra shortcode plugin to use this fancy display( which is used with eStore plugin to enhance the different fancy displays). You can get both the plugins from here:
Wow it’s very useful tips
Photostores are basically more complex than this one-size-fits-all store idea. (Imagine a store that sells 25 different shoes in size 8 medium only.)
Photographers do not offer galleries of 8 x 10/10 x 8 photos to suit this kind of store.
The only option I see would be to have multiple thumbnails uploaded so that each can represent different print ratios/dimensions offered, different resolution offered,different licenses, different print papers offered, matted or unmatted, different packaging & mailing charges to different countries…in order to offer a prospective buyer a choice.
And then the pricing could be set accordingly.
really very useful! thanks
Hi, this is great,do you offer this as a set up service in your wordpress package?
Thanks
This is probably a stupid question, but how do you choose/upload a thumbnail to display with the product? I didn’t like the way things looked using the nextgen gallery + eStore, so I’m using just eStore.
The photos that would be used as thumbnails are in two places: 1) my hard drive and 2) uploaded and part of the media library.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out how to provide eStore with the location of the thumbnails.