OK, the decision is made - for better or worse. We go with Wordpress and add an e-commerce plugin to it.

An e-commerce plugin? I thought you were going to program this all yourself, Dave?

No, sanity has prevailed again. Rather get the best possible e-commerce plugin and spend enough time with it to extract the maximum from it.  If it still won’t quite do the trick, then custom-programming will have to be brought to bear. But first, the best plugin needs to be found. From quite a few that I have found, there appear to be three popular possibilities whose owners seem to be really serious about their product:

1. Market theme
2. Shopp
3. WP E-commerce

Now which one to choose? That choice had better be the right one, or more time will be lost…

• They all say they are the best and will do wonderful things for me.
• They all offer a whole hoard of features, most of which I do not understand.
• Some advertised features I see no necessity for.
• Some advertised features I doubt will work the way I want them to work.
• They all cost money (albeit not a devastatingly large amount).

What to do? Well, the best way would be to set up a site and try them out. Oops… One claims to be free (WP E-commerce), but you need to buy at least one essential add-on. The rest don’t seem to offer trial versions at all.

Well, let’s start with the free one. If it does the job more or less, then they have made the sale and I’ll go with them. Otherwise, I’ll have to buy the next most-promising one. Or maybe I’ll bite the bullet and get all three and try them out. Expensive but maybe wise. I’ll decide later and start with the free one for the moment.

Now, where to set it up?

• On a local server? This will probably take too long to set up and may not be totally compatible to what is offered by my hosting company anyway.
• Delete the old site (after backing it up, of course) and install the test setup in its place? This would be fine, but in the meantime there would be no site up at all! And if I ran into payment-gateway problems, at least there would be an existing site to cross-check with, if I didn’t delete it.
• Rent some new server space temporarily, and point another domain name to it? This might be the most expensive option, but it wouldn’t break the bank either!

So, the third option it must be. Now to order a new site and let the site hosting company set it up. This usually takes 24-hours so in the meantime, I’ll continue trawling the Internet for information on these three plugins…

Wordpress is a blog, right? - Right!

Wordpress is designed for people to post new pieces of prose and pictures regularly, right?  -  Right!

Wordpress is not designed to be an e-commerce solution, right? - Right!

Wordpress can’t really be used as an e-commerce solution, right? - Wrong!

It seems that Wordpress can be customized into just about any kind of web site. The customization potential is enormous - it seems like it was designed to be taken and messed about with. Let’s take a look at what an e-commerce site needs:

1. A database to store the stock for sale. In our case this would be downloadable PDF courses.
2. A way to retrieve those database entries together with their illustrations. In our case this would be example pages.
3. An easily expandable menu system.
4. A search facility.
5. A shopping cart and payment system.
6. To be Search engine friendly with the ability to add metatags to pages.
7. To be able to easily facilitate the addition of new database pages and link to static pages.

Wordpress offers:

1. A database.
2. A way to retrieve those database entries together with their illustrations.
3. A flexible, expandable customizable menu/navigation system.
4. A search facility.
5. The availability of an e-commerce plugin.
6. Search engine friendliness - you won’t believe how fast a new blog post gets indexed by Google.
7. An easy way to facilitate the addition of new database pages and link to static pages.
8. Open source software with built-in permission to be modified.
9. Many other possibilities that I haven’t yet even discovered.

I found a wordpress demo theme for a clothing shop which uses an e-commerce plugin (recommended by one of those helpful Business Warriors), which with a bit of imagination could serve as a very good basis for Fundisi.

This is definitely the way to go. Notify the reverse-engineering department and let’s see how this thing works…