I've looked at this eCommerce within Wordpress problem for several years now and spent many hours (and a few dollars) trying most of the available plugin solutions, as well as the major standalone eCommerce systems. Conclusion? The jury is still out... One I'm looking at closely now, that I actually first heard of in a comment made about it by none other than Flynn, here in this forum, is :
Prestashop
- open source
- clean, modular coding
- relatively easy to extend, free and fee extra modules available
- very rich feature set (including multi-lingual, multi-currency options)
- large variety of free or fee templates (including a few for making it easier to add WP)
- relatively easy to modify and style templates, active forums and support
As with most eCommerce packages, the Prestashop authors (who, by the way, are based in France) assume that Prestashop will be the 'outer shell' application, and any CMS or blogging features will be embedded. Like many others, I want to start with a full fledged WP site and add an online sales function
within it. I've just about given up on this objective and am now looking to link store pages from a WP site, making it as seamless as possible to navigate between them and minimize any glaring shifts in format. I've seen a few examples where this has been done, with custom templates used by both systems - I assume with considerable effort.
I'm hoping that the flexibility of Atahualpa will make adjustments to the WP side much easier. I'm leery of modifications to core files in any major components of a site, because of the nightmare of tracking and maintaining those changes across inevitable and often necessary upgrades, but I'm open to any good ideas and willing to help any efforts to integrate eCommerce into a WP site - for sure doing beta testing, documentation, and perhaps getting involved in coding.
Jack