How to approach displaying products with no shopping cart plugin or post type?

Question

I want to show products like an eCommerce store with product categories and detail pages, but I have no need for a shopping cart or checkout system. This is just to display the products for informational purposes.

I have used custom post types on another project and that worked out fine, but I am wondering if anyone knows of a plugin that would make this fast and easy to customize. Also an import/export feature would be nice for adding lots of products.

Answer 1

if you have no need for regular blog posts, you can just use those. the post is probably not overly different from a custom post type for a product. though i just did a CPT for products and added some cool features. though since they were related to metaboxes and custom columns there's no reason you couldn't add them to posts, but in case you want to use your blog ever, i'd probably keep them as a separate CPT.

the ecommerce plugins i've seen are usually related to setting up your shopping cart.

where do you want to import from? you can always import/export your posts w/ the xml built-in import/exporter

Answer 2

I would recommend going down the custom post route, for the time it takes its totlly worth it, plus it keeps things nice and tidy in the backend.

I would recomend using this plugin to add meta boxes to custom post types http://plugins.elliotcondon.com/advanced-custom-fields/

You will still need to set up the custom post type, stick this in your functions.php

//ADDING CUSTOM POST TYPE 'PRODUCT'
    function products_int(){
        $labels = array(
            'name' => _x('Products, 'post type general name'),
            'singular_name' => _x('Product', 'post type singular name'),
            'add_new' => _x('Add New', 'Product'),
            'add_new_item' => __('Add New Product'),
            'edit_item' => __('Edit Product'),
            'new_item' => __('New Product'),
            'view_item' => __('View Product'),
            'search_items' => __('Search for Products'),
            'not_found' =>  __('No products found'),
            'not_found_in_trash' => __('No products found in Trash'),
            'parent_item_colon' => ''
        );
        $args = array(
            'labels' => $labels,
            'public' => true,
            'publicly_queryable' => true,
            'show_ui' => true,
            'query_var' => true,
            'rewrite' => true,
            'capability_type' => 'post',
            'hierarchical' => false,
            'menu_position' => 4,
            'supports' => array('title','editor','thumbnail'),
            'taxonomies' => array('category')
        );
        register_post_type('product',$args);
    }

//CUSTOM POST TYPE
    add_action('init', 'products_int');

Thats it pretty much