Today we get bring two amazing plugins together with the launch of our Gravity Forms Product Add-ons extension, developed by Lucas Stark.
And as this is to be the last WooCommerce drop before the new year, we’d also like to briefly recap our achievements since WooCommerce launched back in September.
Gravity Forms Extension
↑ Volver al principioWith the Gravity Forms Product Add-ons extension, advanced product configuration forms can be built and linked to any product in WooCommerce. Forms that contain conditional logic, pricing fields, user input prices, conditional-pricing fields, conditional submit button logic can all be created for your products. Additionally, any product that contains a Gravity Form is tracked in the cart to ensure, no matter how complex your product form only unique configurations are added to the cart and duplicates are incremented in quantity.
The Gravity Forms Product Add-ons extension gives you full control over how the display of the prices in the store should appear. You can use the default price displays that WooCommerce will display, or in the case of a configurable product containing pricing fields, set the price to something such as “As Low as $1000â€.
You also have control over when the built in automatic price calculation will be displayed, if at all, and have the ability to configure each label individually.
2011 – A great year for WordPress e-commerce
The final quarter of 2011 has been a very exciting time for us. Not only have we released some awesome themes, but in September we also dived in at the deep end of the WordPress plugins ecosphere with the launch of WooCommerce.
We’ve worked incredibly hard on building a reliable, feature rich eCommerce solution. It has since been supplemented with dozens of premium products which either extend the default functionality, or provide a gorgeous front end to your online stores.
To reflect on our progress, here’s a quick roundup of our WooCommerce specific achievements;
- Almost 40,000 downloads, eclipsing the codebase from which WooCommerce was forked
- Launched 49 premium extensions including payment gateways which make WooCommerce a realistic option for businesses the world over
- Nurtured an active WooCommerce developer community enabling Woo members to monetise their own WooCommerce extensions, ipso facto delivering a greater number of high quality extensions to the WooCommunity at large
- Launched 15 WooCommerce specific themes including child themes for some of our most popular parent themes, and our free theme; Wootique which has been downloaded over 10,000 times.
- Facilitated many free plugins built upon WooCommerce
WooCommerce has truly taken the eCommerce niche within WordPress by storm. We’re extremely proud of the progress we’ve made so far, and excited to continue that through 2012.
Merry Christmas
↑ Volver al principioJust in case you’ve missed it, don’t forget to check out our WooCommerce Xmas bundle. 3 WooCommerce themes, 8 extensions (including table shipping) for $150 – a massive saving of 45%.
And for today only you can get 35% off any individual WooCommerce product using the code 12DAYSWC.
Have a great Christmas!
About
«Almost 40,000 downloads, eclipsing the codebase from which WooCommerce was forked»
Not sure if you call that an «Achievement» guys.. sure it’s great for Woo, but it’s not something to be proud of?.
I think its a testament to our hard work – so I’m proud of it 🙂
I understand that.. I think I would be proud as well.. But from an outsiders perspective it’s JigoShop that had a great thing going, so bragging about how you ecplised/crippled their business can offend some people.
That being said WooCommerce has quickly become a pretty great eCommerce solution, and I hope to keep seeing it evolve in 2012.
That’s a really narrow way to look at it. Woo saw an opportunity to make money by improving an existing product and guess what – they went for it. Why should they have to reinvent the wheel? For karma points?
If JigoShop couldn’t keep their developers happy enough to guard against this sort of thing, that’s their problem. It’s just business, that’s the way things work.
That’s also a narrow way of looking at it 😉 Everyone has to decide for themselves what to make of this thing, but I just pointed out that the comment about eclipsing (especially that word) JigoShop was a bit harsh.. And that comes from someone who’s been a fan of Woo for years.
There’s no denying Woo made a good business decision, but maybe I’m just a softy and feel just a little bit bad for JigoShop once in a while.
Jay was referring to the download count when he made the ‘ecplised’ comment – not the entire business 😉
Does the 12DAYSWC apply to the GravityForm addon? I couldn’t get it to work.
I was able to get it with another coupon but now I get an error when I try to download from my dashboard – I can send you the error text if you want.
I can not get it to work either 🙁
Sorry guys, we’ll get someone to try and fix this up pronto. 🙁
Can you try the coupon now, hopefully the coupon works at least. We’ll try and get the download working now. 🙂
I can’t get it to work either.
«Sorry, but this coupon is not valid for this product.»
Hi Jan, if you still weren’t able to get the add-on shoot us an email so we can help. – support[at]woocommerce.com
WOWIE!!!! Gravity Forms and WooCommerce = My dreams come true! This really made my day guys 🙂
Cool… this looks great.
Just had hoped that my wish of a «Dwolla» based payment gateway would have happened before the end of the year.
Although it is US only at this point, having a gateway that has $0 fees for transactions under $10 (and only $.25 transaction fees _total_ for transactions over $10) would have been awesome. Especially now that they have their «Instant» loading of the account funds.
This Gravity Forms add-on opens up a lot of potential business for me.
Interesting tidbit about Dwolla… the company was founded by a guy named Ben Miline who also ran an online car audio company called Elemental Designs.
During his time at eD, he was known in the community for misrepresenting speaker specifications, hiding customer complaints from public view, ignoring glaring problems with his products, and just being a generally shady character.
Here’s a thread with reactions from people who are familiar with Miline: http://www.caraudioforum.com/showthread.php?p=2778410
If you ask me, you’d be better off using PayPal Business payments. It works basically the same way, costs only $.50 per transaction, and you’re dealing with a company that has a proven track record.
OK, that thread seems more trolling and such as well as not really understanding the business model. Most people don’t get that PayPal isn’t making most of their money off of fees.=) But, noted.
I have been a PayPal customer since way back and yes, it they have so much regulatory oversight going on that it is hard for them to get away with much other than locking accounts.
In regards to PayPal Business Payments, I use them for invoicing my clients, however, there are some issues. The main one is that it only works if they client is paying from a PayPal balance. If not, you have to wait for the «e-check» or funding to clear. Because of this limitation, it is best for invoices and not for general e-commerce.
Another issue is that it seems to still be in pilot stage and not available for everyone to use.
Searching via Google, as well as on PayPal and their X.COMmerce site brings up Freshbooks or nothing at all.
In addition to the above issues, there is also the issue that PayPal Business Payments are not supported by a Payment Gateway on WooCommerce at this time as well. I doubt that would change with the model of how it works.
I am glad to see STRIPE as an option.
The sentiment expressed in that thread is more or less how most of the car audio community felt about Miline and his business practices.
There are countless threads about Elemental Designs floating around on that as well as other forums if you’re interested in reading more about how he has conducted business in the past. I just figured I’d give you a heads-up about the guy running things at Dwolla. Did you read the blog post at TradeHill? That seemed like a pretty legitimate issue to me.
As for the Business Payments… I agree that there are still issues with it, but I’ve been very satisfied with it for invoicing purposes. As far as general e-commerce, you are right, it may not be the best option at this point. I’m Hopeful that PayPal will expand the service a bit so it could be used as a full-fledged payment option.
PayPal Business Payments looks like it was «abandoned.» Not much update in the last 9 or so months. Even the one link I could find from PayPal goes to a 404 error.
I don’t see it being expanded to being more than an invoicing opportunity. Even to use it requires special permission from PayPal.
I would love to see someone come along and compete with PayPal. They have so much «old school» stuff to deal with, including kissing up to Visa, MasterCard, American Express and even Discover.
Stripe, Square and a few others are being somewhat disruptive in the credit card marketplace. Just need a more cash-centric payment option.
Hopefully Dwolla will get just enough traction (and not screw up) to bring some solid competitors within that payment space. With the «Instant» feature, Dwolla has attacked the issues that ZashPay, for example, has with impulse buying. You can’t spend money while waiting days for your account to be «filled.
Will be interesting to see how payment evolves over the next few years.
Regarding the Gravity Forms extension for WooCommerce, I have a potential client that makes customized bicycles with a process too complicated for a basic eCommerce solution, yet the solutions offered to him were too costly.
Looking at putting WooCommerce & Gravity Forms with this extension through its paces after the first of the year.
Here is my shout for subscription payments. I know membership sites are a different baby so to speak, however regardless of privatizing parts of the site with this plugin for woocommerce it would be nice to just get a subscription payment going with a product. I mentioned before, maybe 2012 will bring this joy 🙂 il add to woo ideas and maybe others can jump in and get some thoughts going. Now with the gravity forms addon – it opens up alot of options to create a custom subscription option for say a sports club website, or a small charity website, or even a plugin makers support website.
Ok so I have added the idea here. http://woo.uservoice.com/forums/72423-ideas/suggestions/2470462-subscription-woocommerce-extension Gravity Charge seems to be a subscription based plugin that could work in the future but who knows! Maybe others want to share a vote on this one?
I’m actually pretty excited about that idea. I don’t know what it will entail, but using Gravity Charge with WooCommerce integration could be awesome. 🙂
I have read up on the only information I have here: http://wpcandy.com/reports/exclusive-details-on-the-upcoming-rocketgenius-plugin#more-30578 It looks like gravity charge could be great but as you say maybe there is a chance of a combo here with woo or maybe its a case of one or the other!! right now id just love something reliable around the actual subscription model really and not even all the access rules for content after the payment. Maybe this will get some interest from others over time 😉
The Woo team and I have already had discussions regarding Gravity Charge and WooCommerce integration. We will most definitely be looking into how we can introduce integration between the two of them.
Membership oriented sites that involve all kinds of complex content access control is most definitely a completely different animal from a shopping cart oriented ecommerce solution primarily focused on physical products.
BUT there are certainly synergies as well, they both involve users making a purchase via an online payment. We definitely intend on exploring those synergies and coming up with good ways to integrate the two products.
2012 should be a great year for advanced WordPress solutions from both the team at WooThemes as well as our team here at rocketgenius.
And Woo has done it again. I have an e-commerce project coming up and I’m heavily leaning towards woocommerce…..and since I’m a huge fan of Gravity Forms, I really think it’s going to end up being a woo-commerce site for sure now….Thanks for making my decision a little bit easier.
Woot Woot!
You know we love to hear that. 😉
Keep us posted on the site!
Still looking around trying to work out whether the widgets for ecommerce are part of the subscription price bundle….
Unfortunately not, the subscriptions only cover themes at the moment and not any WooCommerce Extensions. I do believe we’re looking to add an extensions subscription in the future. 🙂
Ok, I’m looking at the canvas child commerce simply as its the most clean (minimalist).
I’m really more interested in the commerce function rather than the parent blog. So, can I put the commerce function on say http://www.shop.mydomain.com (with an SSL cert) with a permanent redirect off http://www.mydomain.com and if people then want to access the parent blog (say http://www.blog.mydomain.com) they can do that via the commerce shop header tabs which will be the landing page? It sounds doable but can this handle the parent and child being on 2 separate subdomains? (I’m guessing yes.. but just need to check).
Hi,
I don’t think you can have one WP installation be on two separate domains unfortunately.
Would be great if it was clearer what a «child theme» actually is. My initial view that its effectively like a plugin to the parent theme, an extension of ecommerce to a standing package; However reading some other info I’m beginning to wonder if you don’t see the parent and it replaces the parent (That acts as a framework) while the child code can be manipulated. Probably would be useful if that was explained in the FAQ.
This is in response to «hmmmm»‘s question regarding child themes.
You are correct in how you look at child themes. That isn’t exact but they are indeed similar to a plugin for a parent theme.
A parent theme acts as the base framework and is also activate when a child theme is activated. So you inherit all the features of the parent. The child theme can then override, enhance or change the parent theme without actually changing its code.
This lets you customize a theme using a child theme without changing the parent theme code, which allows it to be upgraded easier when an update for the parent theme is released.
Typically theme upgrades are difficult because once you start editing the theme files directly to make customizations you won’t want to upgrade the theme because you will lose your changes or will have to re-apply them.
Parent and child themes solve that by allowin the parent to be upgraded while the child contains your customizations.
Just like themes customize WordPress without changing WordPress core code, child themes customize the parent theme without changing the parent theme core code.
Bummer i only bought Product Add-ons extension last week to try and do what this gravity forms extension does (namely configurable products). Any chance i can swap them please?
Shoot us an email when you can. 🙂 – support[at]woocommerce.com
The gravity forms look amazing by the way. I wonder how the data is stored for these forms (table structure).
Is there a limit to the number of fields you can create with the gravity form?
Gravity Forms creates it’s own custom tables in your WordPress database. The data is stored across a few different tables.
It’s data storage quite complex due to the fact it’s a form builder so the forms are not pre-defined, each form can be unique because you start with a blank state and create your form by adding whichever fields you want to use.
There is no limit to the number of fields you can add to a form and if you have a lot of fields you can then break up the presentation into multiple-pages using the Page Break field.
This is why the world should love Gravity Forms. 😉
Nice me two!
It’d be nice if I could actually purchase the extension instead of it erroring out on purchase.
I had the same issue yesterday, try again after a few hours, wait for the page to load completely, maybe that has something to do with it
I’ve bought the extension and using Gravity Forms 1.62 with WP3.3 but unfortunately the write panel in the product admin page is not showing up, so I have no way to insert forms.
I’m waiting for an answer from the technical support here:
http://woocommerce.com/support-forum/?viewtopic=69461
in case someone has the same issue
I have the same issue – I flagged it in the forums – are you using Multi-site. My testing of it is as follows, shows up fine in single site install and does not show up in multi-site
oh yeah the very same setup, perhaps I should have mentioned that
mmm I guess I could switch to single site (Gravity forms is installed multisite wide) although I might be better for my setup to not have Gravity Forms on single site
I tried to switch WooCommerce to multisite, but that didn’t change the issue
I’ll wait for an answer from the WooCommerce staff, maybe it’s a issue easy to fix… otherwise I will be forced to change my setup, too bad
yip it looks like because this extension is so new that maybe multi-site has not been part of the testing just yet. All my single installs work fine however which is good, but multi-site support is needed. I too have a form thread on this and will wait for maybe an update to the extension for multi-site.
ok do you mind posting the link to that forum thread here? I will keep an eye on that too
thanks
here is the link sorry: http://woocommerce.com/support-forum/?viewtopic=69166