How to build your own shop using open source software

*quick disclaimer: most of this is gibberish, even to us, but you never know, might help you too!

Forget the bloat, stay away from HEAVY templates, don’t spend your life switching functionality off and on.

You are the DESIGNER, design it from raw materials, understand how things are happening. Efficient, intelligent and above all fun.

Here’s what you need to know

WordPress is GO! – We use up to date WordPress, it’s what we know and it’s open source.
Twenty Twelve Theme is GO! Developed by WordPress, in our opinion it’s the best bare bones blank page template out there and we ‘get’ and ‘dig’ the responsiveness. Just three or four break points and pop it goes to a scaling single column – We are designers, we stick things down and make them look good. Don’t need slippy. We’re fluffy.

So WordPress with a WordPress base theme that has more support than the AA, the RAC or the NHS put together…. for idiots too. Start your search in Google. If you ask good technical questions, you’ll get good technical answers. Good luck with that.

Which brings us on to the Child Theme which is where our edits begin. ANYTHING you edit comes from the main theme, duplicated into the CHILD theme. Get it? Good.

Never hack core files kids.

So… now we want a shop.

Woocommerce + payment gateway of your choice

Er… how do we add Woocommerce functionality and layouts to our Twenty Twelve Child

Third party / custom / non-WC theme compatibility

To be continued…

And don’t forget to HIT BackUp Buddy

SIDEBARS AND PAGE TEMPLATES IN TWENTY TWELVE

Woocommerce does not respect the Twenty Twelve page templates when it comes to sidebars. Instead of trying to switch the sidebar off, we just pulled all the widgets out
of that widget area.