We are looking into adding a WooCommerce integration to Pinegrow and first need to learn more about what users (you) actually need, and how you use WC (such a great acronym )
WC comes with a set of predefined templates that make it possible to integrate the shop with just adding the woocommerce_content() function. I’m guessing that this is usually not enough, right?
What is your process of building a WC site? Do you override the supplied template parts or add template functions directly to your custom code? How about styling?
What is the biggest pain you hope PG WC would solve?
I have been waiting for this for years now so I am glad to see you finally are doing something about it since woo is such a huge part of WordPress.
First an answer to your last question.
PG WC would finally make it possible to have a full solution without a pagebuilder, and now all projects I have had that involve woo I used Elementor or Oxygen to save time.
It’s simply not time-effective to use pinegrow to make the main template and then hand code the wocommerce part so for each site. If a client needs woo I go for Elementor or Oxygen and just skip pinegrow all together.
Elementor is by far the best when it comes to customization options for woo out of the box but with a bit of manual coding oxygen gets the job done well and performance-wise much better than elementor.
I would not mind a bit of PHP code and things like that as long as you have to option to customize and style everything.
I can’t answer any of your other questions because I do not hand-code woocommerce sites because most of my clients does not care how I do it as long as I get the job done and as fast as possible and in most cases, hand-coding is not an option unless the client has a bigger budget.
What I suggest is to have a look at Elementor and Oxygen and see what they do and try to implement something similar or better.
Oxygens options for woo are a bit limited but a guy on youtube just made an awesome tutorial and how to style and change everything in oxygen with small bits of PHP code ,some custom styling and with a few small plugins such as wishlists.
I suggest you have a look at those tutorials and get some inspiration from them and maybe you can find a better way to handle the problems or if we could do the same in PG WC it would be awesome because then we finally could stop relying on pagebuilders.
Not sure about posting links and things here so ill post his youtube channel and you can just find it yourself on youtube.
His youtube channel is “Design with Cracka” and he got a whole tutorial called how to build a woocommerce store in oxygen and it’s an awesome tutorial and you should get some inspiration on how to do things in PG WC.
I’d really love to see WooCommerce support in PG! It’s quite easy to create Wordpress themes in PG at the moment but WooCommerce is a pain. I’d love to see special smart actions and simple placeholders like Product image, Price and so on. Also predefined sites for a product page, cart and so on would be great.
To my current knowledge utilizing WC action & hooks allow for greater control and customization while virtually eliminating the unpredictable template override behavior often caused when upgrading WC and its extensions so inherently they’re more future proof as a result to update a hook call string vs an entire template IMHO.
A minor vent
Begin Rant: It’s an incredibly intense process that involves a lot of rage quitting and switching between PG/WP/WC Code References because although I utilize a WP compatible server for site hosting, I don’t want to build my site strictly online within the WP environment and rely upon the convoluted, array of bloated WP/WC plug-ins that have the tendency to cause drastic site slow down, security issues, deprecated support or cause the site to be too high maintenance to maintain. At the time of this writing I’ve yet to find any offline or stand alone solution for WC. I do realize the situation is only like this for me because my preference or mindset for site development calls for me not to use predesigned templates that are easily attained across the internet but it’s not worth it to have to reverse engineer other templates when I have immediate access to such a cool app as Pinegrow. End Rant
I’m extremely excited to see this topic arise because I’ve been searching the web endlessly since my PG-WP purchase to discover a clean way to simply load the WC action & filter hook library and enqueue those scripts within my development workflow.
Build custom loop for shop archive
Customize the mini cart
Build a variable swatch
Customize the product single page
ACF support for woocommerce
Customize the checkout page
A wocoomerce intergration would be for me a killer feature
Very Nice! this would take PG to another whole level. @matjaz is the integration always on your road map? do you have an approx timeline?
I am kindly asking because I have a couple of projects starting soon that eventually will need an eCommerce integration and in light of this news I could very well develop straight in pinegrow expecting with confidence the wc addon.
Woo integration is confirmed, but the development didn’t start yet. I think the first Beta is a couple of months out. And you know how reliable time estimates are To be on the safe side I think it is best to do upcoming projects in the usual way.
My main concern is custom styling. I would like to be able to create custom woocommerce loops that I can build using custom HTML and CSS (like we can do already in pinegrow with post loops). And be ablo to use those features inside gutenberg blocks in the way they were recently integrated into Pinegrow. That and a customized cart would be nice too.
Thanks for the honest advice.
I will develop one the usual way and the other in PG! e-commerce integrations on the later one should not happen before a year or so. I can curiously await.
Keep up the excellent job.
After taking a closer look into WC I have a further question:
WC comes with a mix of low level functions such as wc_get_related_products and with template parts such as single-product/related.php with their own HTML markup.
So, we have two options of how PGWC could work:
Provide smart actions such as Show Related Products that could be added to any HTML layout. Like PGWP smart actions work now.
Customize WC by customizing template parts.
What would be your preferred way?
Also, are you using frameworks like Bootstrap and Tailwind with WC, or are you sticking with the framework that comes with WC and customize that?
Prefer the flexibility of option 1 (it’ll allow SVG UI that I’m currently researching) and because it’s implemented like PGWP smart actions the workflow learning curve would be reduced do to its familiarity.
Not sure if sticking with the framework WC provides would be a best in class solution in PG compared with Bootstrap or Tailwind, however utilizing WC backend frameworks certainly sounds more future proof so I’d prefer which ever is the lesser to maintain over the long haul because I’m sure when the time comes to upgrade or reconstruct the PGWC site I will require a ton of frontend iterations that’ll require several newly improved Action-Filter Hook swaps (because of PHP8) IMHO.
Provide smart actions such as Show Related Products that could be added to any HTML layout. Like PGWP smart actions work now.
The reason I prefer this way is due to the fact I often convert HTML designs to WordPress and I could simply just use an Eccomerce design for the Woocommerce part and I would be all set.
I love how PG smart actions work and if you could make PGWC work the same way it would be awesome.PG smart actions give me a lot of flexibility when it comes to design.
I use Bootstrap as a framework and I would just stick with that since it’s the one people use the most. Not a fan of Tailwind at all.
Thanks! Doing Woo smart actions that add features to custom HTML feels like the right direction to me as well. This also makes it possible to create reusable eCommerce blocks for BS, TW etc.
We’ll soon have a simple prototype and push it out through Pinegrow Live. And then we can work together to iterate and get the features right.
There is not much sense in building custom Cart and Checkout, right?
We could focus on making products and product lists customizable and stick to WC defaults (or other plugins) for cart and checkout. Does this agree with your real-life projects?
I do have clients that often want a custom cart, checkout and a custom thank you page.
However, I would not say it’s the most important thing to focus on first and maybe add that in a later update but I would add it to the roadmap for the future.
Now I mostly use Elementor for woocommerce because I can pretty much change anything to the client’s needs.
The workflow I have in mind with PGWC is to simply convert HTML designs to woocommerce and most of the time you have cart and checkout designs and with the option to make it custom you can follow the design of the rest of the page and have a consistent look and feel of the site.
Sometimes clients want to add or remove some form fields on the checkout page and it would be nice to have an option like the smart action form in PG to work with the checkout page. Then I could just add a smart action form around the HTML form of the checkout page and add or remove whatever I want on the page. Sure you can use a plugin to remove or add fields but sometimes you want to reorder and change the layout to make it look better. Also, the reason I like PG is I can minimize the use of plugins on the sites and I always try to keep the plugins to a minimum.
Elementor Pro is the king when it comes to woocommerce and i think it’s important to match the options to Elementor when it comes to customization.For me it’s important to have the flexibility to solve most things my clients want and with Elementor I can pretty much do anything so for me to jump ship when it comes to Woo then PGWC needs to have the same features or at least have the same features on the roadmap.
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