Table of Contents for
Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce - Second Edition

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce - Second Edition by Robbert Ravensbergen Published by Packt Publishing, 2015
  1. Cover
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce Second Edition
  4. Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce Second Edition
  5. Credits
  6. About the Author
  7. About the Reviewers
  8. www.PacktPub.com
  9. Preface
  10. What you need for this book
  11. Who this book is for
  12. Conventions
  13. Reader feedback
  14. Customer support
  15. 1. Setting Up WooCommerce
  16. Installing WooCommerce
  17. Setting up WooCommerce
  18. Summary
  19. 2. Creating Your First Products
  20. Creating your first product
  21. Setting the categories, tags, and images for your product
  22. Summary
  23. 3. Using Downloadable Products and Variations
  24. Using attributes
  25. Setting up variable and grouped products
  26. Other product types
  27. Summary
  28. 4. Payments, Shipping, and Coupons
  29. Shipping methods and prices
  30. Using discount coupons
  31. Summary
  32. 5. Working with WooCommerce Themes
  33. Making or buying a theme
  34. Installing a WooCommerce theme
  35. Using the Storefront theme
  36. Summary
  37. 6. Customizing a WooCommerce Theme
  38. WordPress theme basics
  39. Developing WooCommerce themes
  40. Summary
  41. 7. Running Your Online Store
  42. Deploying your WooCommerce store
  43. Working with sales orders
  44. Reporting
  45. Summary
  46. 8. More Possibilities Using Plugins
  47. Popular and useful WooCommerce plugins
  48. A store in multiple languages
  49. Summary
  50. Index

Deploying your WooCommerce store

Once you've set up your store, added products, and changed e-mails if needed, you're ready to start the deployment process of your store. Assuming that up until now, you've been working in a development environment, there's one more important thing that you need to do before bringing live your online store: test it!

Just use your store as if you are a customer. Is everything clear for the visitor? Are the links to conditions and shipping information easily available? Is it clear what payment methods you're offering? But above all, does the order process work? It's very important to spend some time in your own store and actually create orders yourself. So you are sure that it is working and that the e-mails that the customer receives are clear and correct.

If everything is okay, you can start the deployment process. There are many ways to deploy a website from development to live, but, in this example, we use a basic, simple technique to do it. Note the steps below only work if you're deploying a new website. If you are adding WooCommerce to an existing website, other steps could be needed.

  1. Create a copy of the WordPress database. Actually, you should do this regularly for every website that you own or are developing. A tool like PhpMyAdmin may be used to create the backup. If you don't know how, also a database backup plugin can be used: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-db-backup/.
  2. If you're developing locally, you'll already have a complete file set of your WordPress installation available. If your temporary site is hosted with a hosting provider, you first need to create a full backup. Use an FTP tool like FileZilla to create one. Or you could even use a WordPress plugin to create a full backup.
  3. Next, restore the backup that you just created to the hosting environment at your hosting provider. Again, using FTP with FileZilla is an easy and straightforward method to do this:
    Deploying your WooCommerce store
  4. Restore your database backup using the Import function of PhpMyAdmin, which is offered by almost every hosting provider.
  5. Change the setting in your wp-config.php so that it holds the correct values for accessing the database at your hosting provider. If you make changes locally, be sure to upload the file using FTP again.
  6. Basically, your store should be working now. However, settings and the contents of sidebars might be lost. This is caused by the way WordPress stores its data in the database. The complete URL, including the domain name, is stored. This is an issue because now that your store is live, the domain name has changed. To correct this situation, we need to do a find and replace in the database so that it will hold the correct domain name in all the records. There are several methods to do this, but I recommend using the tool of InterconnectIT: https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/. Download the tool and upload it to your hosting environment. Use it to do a search and replace from http://localhost/… to http://yourdomain.com. Click the Dry run button to test the result, and use the Live run button to confirm and save the changes:
    Deploying your WooCommerce store

After doing these database changes, your online store will be available on the new domain. Test if it is reachable on your domain, and also test if you can reach the WordPress administrative panel of your site. If something went wrong, your site won't be available. In that case, restore your database and start again.

Tip

If you need more information about moving your development website to a live environment, you may find a tutorial including more details on my website: http://www.joomblocks.com/moving-a-wordpress-website.