Book Review: Wordpress 2.9 e-Commerce
We bang on a lot here at e-commerce website design about Magento being the king of e-commerce. Granted it is very very good as an e-commerce platform, but how is it at being a CMS for content? Adam posted a little while ago about this very fact: Magento as a CMS
The conclusion was – yes it is quite useful in a number of ways but doesn’t really compete to the worlds number 1 blogging platform. Wordpress.
Wordpress, like all good CMS systems is an extensible, open-source beast that allows the user the ability to create a number of different site ideas from one simple installation. Whether you want a blog, a complete website or even an e-commerce site – Wordpress has it all (after a couple of plug-ins of course).
As Wordpress is easy to install, easy to configure and even easier to maintain it interested me enough to pick up the Wordpress 2.9 e-Commerce book from packtpub.com to see how well it can maintain it’s easy of use when e-commerce was thrown into the mix.
First Impressions
The book is very well styled, the flower on the front cover – perhaps a lotus or something similar – fully compliments the content therein, it’s a theme that has been carried out through a lot of Packt publications and is one that I’ve always wondered about. Do people really think flowers have anything to do with building e-commerce systems? Only in the abstract. That of the installation of a tiny seed to the gentle application of nutritious back links and a healthy dose of direct payment gateways. What you end up with is a fully blossomed online store.
Packaging aside, the content is really well written, like it’s been crafted by mother nature herself – enough of that, stop it, stop it now.
In total there are 11 chapters, and a fair appendices – meaning that this book has been well researched – always check for a lengthy appendices in these types of books, you don’t really want to fork out £27.99 on something somebody made up out of thin air…
What we expect from this book
What do we expect from this book? Well picking it up and reading through it I was expecting to have a nice healthy, relatively simple e-commerce website set up in a matter of hours – guess what. I did. Not only is this book easy to follow but it is also very practical in the way it teaches you – just like all of Packt publications that I have had the pleasure to read so far. I can almost guarantee that if you read this book and followed it’s steps from 9am on a Saturday morning you will have a fully working Wordpress e-commerce website (and one hell of a stiff neck) by 2am Sunday morning.
Outside the box
What does this book teach us that is outside of the scope of e-commerce design? Well for starters this book is for those who enjoy wordpress. Pure and simple. Anything from useful wordpress plug-ins (All-In-One SEO plug-in is given a mention) all the way to useful themes and payment gateways.
Come on – who is the intended audience for this book?
It may surprise you when I say this but I’ve gone through this book with a fine tooth-comb and I cannot see a simple piece of writing that has left me scratching my head – honestly – I struggle to even find the few snippets of HTML that are interspersed rarely throughout these pages. There is literally nothing in this book which would scare the average designer. The number of beautifully detailed images depicting the workings of the e-commerce system are all screen-shots of the CMS! This book is so easy to read and easy to follow that even the Magento Fox would gladly bury his paws in it.
Final thoughts
If you are serious about making an online venture with an e-commerce store then this book is well worth a read – heck – it’s even worth a read if you are head-over-heels in love with Magento. Always useful to have a backup plan…
This book wraps the world of e-commerce up in one almighty phrase – user-friendly. When has an e-commerce site been user-friendly all the way from installation, customisation, theme creation and online selling? Not many times that’s for sure.
Thanks for visiting our magento blog. Take care and we’ll be back with another book review very shortly!


