Shopperpress is an ecommerce WordPress theme that has many functions, but some are not so obvious. For example, you can’t easily edit the header navigation bar links. While it automatically links to pages you create and gives you the option to hide the ones you don’t want displayed, you can’t add custom links without editing the theme files directly. We created a Shopperpress child theme for one of our clients, but we didn’t want to break the inherent functionality of the theme – we wanted to work with it. The problem was, the client wanted the header navigation bar to link to “articles”, but it wasn’t really clear at first how to do this.
How to Link to Articles in Shopperpress
Shopperpress takes over WordPress default post types and calls them “Products”. This means that typical blog content is forced over to a custom post type called “Articles”. These articles are created and managed in the “Article Manager”. If your WordPress website already had blog posts, these will need manually changed over to the post type “Article Manager”. To display all of the articles, create a page called “Articles” or “Blog” or whatever you like and change the Page Template type to “Articles Template”. This “TPL” file in the Shopperpress theme calls a hook that pulls in all of the articles. This new page will now appear in the header navigation until it is asked not to. To change the order in the menu, change the Order number of the pages. The lowest number, starting at “0” will appear on the left and the highest number will appear on the right. If the numbers are the same, they go in the order they were created.
More Notes About Shopperpress Blog Function
- Shopperpress requires you to change the Permalinks to %postname% which means that you lose any SEO value of putting categories before post names with %category%/%postname%.
- Shopperpress requires you to put in a description for each article. It doesn’t automatically display the content or the excerpt. This gives you more control, but takes time.
- Exported blog post Articles created as the Articles Template custom post type will not display on a default WordPress installation when imported unless Shopperpress is used.
While Shopperpress is great for automatically pulling in affiliate products from sites like Amazon and eBay, it’s not a great blogging platform, but that’s okay if your primary goal is to use WordPress for ecommerce. However, if you’re wanting to develop an ecommerce site, we are currently recommending Big Commerce due to it’s speed, extensibility, and CSS/HTML editability.