---
title: "WordPress Shopping Carts"
date: 2007-01-02
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $('#toc').toc({ minimumHeaders: 3, listType: 'ul', showSpeed: 0, headers: '#content h2, #content h3, #content h4, #content h5, #content h6' }); /*..."
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2007/01/02/wordpress-shopping-carts/index.html
---

> For AI agents: a documentation index is available at https://idratherbewriting.com/llms.txt. Markdown versions of all pages are available by appending .md to any page URL.

# WordPress Shopping Carts

I created [a site](http://maryoverley.com/) for a friend who simply wanted some presence on the Internet to publish her essays. Easy enough. I decided to use WordPress as a CMS. I thought I could do it all in about an hour, but then of course I ran into a few snags.

Here are the two main technical snags:

- Creating a static home page, and having the blog area available from another link.
- Integrating the e-commerce lite shopping cart.

The solution to the static home page proved to be pretty simple. The best solution is available is the one on the [Turbocharged site](http://turbochargedcms.com/2006/11/building-a-true-home-page-into-your-wordpress-blog/). However, the specifics of my situation made it tough. I created the site as an add-on domain in a folder directory on my host. Whenever I used the method described on Turbocharge, the .htaccess file kept being overwritten and it caused the site links not to work. This is because I had enabled permalinks. I thought the Turbocharge method was faulty, so I kept looking for alternatives.

The .htaccess file controls how the site reads the pages of the directory. The only solution I found was to disable permalinks. This means the URLs aren't pretty, but I consider it the problem of the add-on domain situation. The guy at Blue Host (my host) said things can easily go haywire with add-on domains.

The second problem was with the [e-commerce lite shopping cart plugin](http://www.instinct.co.nz/?p=16). It seems simple on the surface, but despite the instructions included on one of the tabs, it is not entirely intuitive. I have to remember this when I write instructions: always dumb-down the level lower than you think.

But figuring it out wasn't too difficult after a while. The problem was that after I got everything working, I realized that [the shopping cart dropped down](http://www.maryoverley.com/?page_id=23) when the user added products. The cart dropped right over the text of the products themselves! Frustrating. I added some text at the top to fix that. But then I discovered another problem: the cart only worked in Firefox, not IE.

I later realized that the page parameters within the e-commerce tab didn't have the pages of the add-on domain's URL, and that was why I was getting the empty cart error.

If I could have one WordPress wish, it would be for some brilliant PHP programmer to create a more robust, functional shopping cart for WordPress.

Despite all of these shortcomings, I think once I get the method down, I could create a website with a shopping cart in about an hour. :)

[View the site](http://maryoverley.com/)

[![overley1](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/overleysite2.gif)](http://maryoverley.com/)