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I am currently in the middle of developing quite an extensive and complicated record label website that uses post types and a whole bunch of relationship mapping to map post types to one another.

Part of the major functionality of the site is a store. Because I have an "Artists" post type called "artists" I would like to use a store plugin that offers variations as I will be dealing with physical and digital music sales, as well as selling merchandise and would like to use a plugin that takes advantage of custom post types.

I would like to be able to relate one or more items to a particular artist in the "artist" post type so that I don't have to make the client enter the artists names again, thus having to different locations storing the same data.

I've taken a look at MarketPress created by WPMU Dev, but it seems as though support for variations isn't quite there yet.

WP E-Commerce 3.8 (currently in beta) by Instinct supposedly uses custom post types, but to me it doesn't appear to be using custom post types whatsoever, but rather it's own interface.

I also tried PHPPurchase as well, but out-of-the-box it uses pages instead of post types. I did find a tutorial telling you how to supposedly use custom post types with it, but it hardly seemed like true post type integration, the tutorial is located here.

If you have a way I can relate my artists post type to any pre-existing shop plugins for Wordpress, that would be awesome too and I wouldn't mind having to add in different code to relate the two.

Commercial and free solutions welcomed.

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  • I have not had time to try the 3.8 branch of WP E-Commerce, but last November I did talk to one of the people working on it and he said they were using custom post types for the back end, not sure why anything would have changed since then.
    – mtekk
    Commented Jan 14, 2011 at 5:50
  • Hmm, that is strange. When clicking products on the left hand side menu it using this kind of structure: admin.php?page=wpsc-edit-products as opposed to using post_type=... Are post types not being used literally and perhaps just in the backend? The reason I need the menu to be a post type is because I am using a post type relation plugin to associate post types to one another. When editing a pre-existing product the url structure is: admin.php?page=wpsc-edit-products&action=wpsc_add_edit&product=8&product_parent&_wpnonce=352a78ca8f
    – Dwayne Charrington
    Commented Jan 14, 2011 at 5:55
  • Sorry, this isn't an answer but I just joined and can't figure out how to post a follow up question or send a private message. Not sure why I would need reputation to do so. Now that it's nearly three months later I wanted to know if you ended up using Dukapress and whether you were happy with it. I'm going through an e-commerce evaluation right now and only want to use a solution that natively uses custom post types as products. Would you still use Dukapress over MarketPress?
    – Yaron
    Commented Mar 30, 2011 at 18:40
  • @Yaron simple - you need reputation for that because site rules say so. :) And there are no private messages on site. Just the way things work.
    – Rarst
    Commented Apr 26, 2011 at 6:42
  • @Yaron Sorry for the late reply, but yes Dukapress is awesome and definitely is a better choice over MarketPress. However, I ended up using WP e-Commerce after discovering custom post types were being used.
    – Dwayne Charrington
    Commented Aug 11, 2011 at 0:03

1 Answer 1

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You Should look at dukapress it a fairly new E-Commerce plugin but its loaded with features and it uses Custom post types.

and as for the relation part, i had that same challenge as your are having in developing a site for one of my customers, i needed to relate a CPT (custom post type) named "Question" to Groups of CTP named "Answer" so i could display all answers of a question in the same page as the question itself and i ended up doing like this

for each answer i added a custom field named "Q_ID" an just set its value to the corresponding Question Post type ID.

made things real easy as far as using query_posts or a custom WP_Query cant remember and only selecting posts of type "Answer" with Custom Filed named Q_ID that equals to my Question Post Type ID.

$q= array( 
"POST_TYPE"=>'Answer',
'meta_key' =>'Q_ID', 
'meta_compare' => '=' 
'meta_value' => $Questions_Post_TYPE_ID
);
query_posts($q);

hope this helps.

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  • Wow, thank you. Taking a look at Dukapress right now, it looks amazing on the features page, so I am downloading and installing it. As for relating post types, that is a really clever. Because the client isn't all too tech minded, how easy is the custom field for the end client and if possible, could I have it so they can select an artist inside of a meta box that perhaps pre populates the custom field?
    – Dwayne Charrington
    Commented Jan 15, 2011 at 5:07
  • you could do that,
    – Bainternet
    Commented Jan 15, 2011 at 5:15
  • oopsss :), basically create a metabox with say a dropdown select field and populate it with all available "Artists" and all your user will have to do is just select the right one. just make sure here remember to pick on and you make sure that you save it as a custom field. in my case it was all done from the front end so in the form at the bottom of the question page (post your answer form) i just added a hidden field with the the Question ID.
    – Bainternet
    Commented Jan 15, 2011 at 5:21
  • Ah, of course. In-fact, I've done this on a project I worked on a few months back. Thanks for your help!
    – Dwayne Charrington
    Commented Jan 16, 2011 at 1:29

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