It looks like the entire United Kingdom… or at least the percentage involved in property… needs Emergency Remedial Mathematics lessons.

The UK economy leaps out of recession, like a grasshopper trying to jump on Jupiter, triggering a mass hallucinatory episode amongst real estate agents whom, I can only guess, come to the incorrect conclusion that “0.1%” is somehow a fraction representing “1 percent”, and consequently re-list all their properties using a multiple of that figure.

Optimism abounds. :-]

Well, version 2 actually, rather than a Rod Stewart/Tina Turner duet.

YAK version 2 has just been released (the WP site should update shortly). This is a major release, with a large number of changes. Most important to note for upgraders, is YAK now uses WordPress’s shortcode API and also supports multiple shipping options. See the change list below for what this actually means, but before upgrading, I recommend taking a note of your current shipping configuration, and taking a backup of your WP environment (just to be safe).

Changes include (note, read braces {} below as square brackets []):

• Updated the codebase to use WordPress’s shortcodes API. This means the old parameter style (e.g. {yak_price type id}) is replaced by the new style {yak_price id=”" type=”"}. For example, {yak_price small 23} becomes {yak_price id=”23″ type=”small”}. {yak_quantity medium} becomes {yak_quantity type=”medium”}
• Renamed {error_message} tag to {yak_error_message} (for consistency’s sake)
• Added a {yak_sku} tag. This takes the id and type parameters (same as yak_size). For example, {yak_sku type=”small”}
• Added a facility for loading custom modules
• Added “Proceed to checkout” link to yak order widget
• Added support for multiple shipping options (this means you’ll need to reconfigure your shipping settings — on the plus side, YAK now supports more than one shipping option). Shipping is now configured in a separate screen (YAK Shipping), and is broken into 3 tabs – Basic (the basic config settings, including where you can specify what shipping options you support), Zones (specify which country belongs to which zone), and Options (where you can set the price of shipping to each zone for each option).
• Added a test facility for the confirmation email message
• Added (very) basic low stock notification
• Changed “Buy” button on the initial cart page to “Checkout”
• Added an option to include the price on Buy Button drop-down (i.e. multi options)
• Changed ID on the buy button so that it’s unique
• Added “PAYMENT_PROCESSED” option to the orders screen — for orders which have been (manually) paid (either manual credit card or deposit/cheque, for example) but not yet shipped.
• Added “DELETE” option to the orders screen — only allows orders which are CANCELLED or in ERROR to be deleted

ADDENDUM: there was a minor Javascript bug I missed fixing (and meant to before the release), so version 2.0.1 will be on the update site shortly.

This is cool – SWFK was the top voted comment (option?) on a recent stack overflow discussion about programming for 11 year olds:
stackoverflow.com/…/which-programming-language-is-manageable-by-an-11-year-old-kid

There’s finally a German version in progress:
code.google.com/p/swfk-de/

Here’s a news group discussion about SWFK being used (at least in part) for a course on teaching Python:
archives.seul.org/schoolforge/…/msg00041.html

And finally, the book also made the list of beginner’s tools on the sugarlabs wiki:
wiki.sugarlabs.org/…/Resources

Chuffed.

Here’s a judge who has completely lost touch with reality:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6811239/Businessman-jailed-for-attacking-intruder—who-goes-free.html

Quote:

It’s difficult to believe that this outcome reflects the thinking of the public, or the interests of justice.

I would say not difficult… more like impossible.

So, cross the US back off the list of places I want to visit any time soon…

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=932

Don’t know if he actually wrote it, but under the assumption he did, this is brilliant:

http://bastardoldholborn.blogspot.com/2009/11/mandelson-censors-jeremy-clarkson.html

YAK version 1.8.0 was released yesterday. This release includes the following changes:

• Add a discount override, to allow for discounts on a per-product basis (useful to get rid of old stock, for example)
• Add option-selection to products. This differs from the categorisation-method of specifying different types of a product, and allows you to setup a selectable range of options (multi-select). Thus you might have a mix-and-match product, where a customer can select 3 out of 10 options, and so on.
• Split installation code into separate file
• Fix a compatibility problem with the exclude-pages plugin
• Add more logging to product update process
• Add threshold-based promotions — promotions which are triggered by the value of the order, rather than by a promotion code/voucher.

I’m currently in the process of updating the handbook to take into account the new features. Those who have previously purchased the handbook will receive an updated copy as soon as it’s done.

Version 1.7.7 of YAK for WordPress has been released.

This release includes mainly bug fixes, including the following:

• Hopefully fix a problem with glob (on some PHP installs)
• Move order widget into separate file
• Change “Espana” into “Spain” in English files.
• Fix problem with country missing from shipping address in confirmation email and in order screen
• Add a new tag [phone] to confirmation email
• Fix a problem with address in order export
• Add message to Credit Card entry notifying the customer that they have a final chance to confirm/cancel the order
• Updated German translation, provided by Joern

This release has been tested on both WP and WPMU.

I was updating the SWFK project page with the total number of downloads (since I last updated it in March), and discovered that I’ve miscalculated the figure. I use awstats for my site, and usually just go through all the swfk-*.zip links for each month, using a calculator, to work out the sub-total, then add the downloads from the Google Code project page. However, this time I used a spreadsheet, and it appears as if I’ve previously missed a few thousand downloads. So while I thought the the grand total was around 16K, it looks like it’s actually in the region of 19K. Which is something like 18-20GB worth of data — a reasonably impressive figure, when I think about it.

Perhaps I’ll throw myself a party when I hit 20K…

I’ve noticed what seems to be a predilection, by those who write reviews of WordPress shopping cart plugins and themes, to stick YAK at the bottom of the list. Probably because the number of downloads is below the others. But the final result is something along the lines of:

WP-Ecommerce: feature, feature, feature, feature…
Shopp: feature, feature, feature, feature…
Eshop: feature, feature, feature, feature…
YAK: [gawd I'm tired of listing features... let's not bother with it any more... what can come up with instead... oh I know] it’s a simple plugin!

It’s getting old. Frankly.

So, this is an attempt to come up with a reasonably objective comparison of the shopping cart plugins for WordPress, without excluding the one at the end because someone-got-bored-before-they-finished-writing. You might be wondering how I can be objective when I develop one of those very plugins — well, we’ll see how I do, I guess.

I’m going to take a look at the major e-commerce plugins (not themes, because this probably should be an apples-to-apples comparison). First up, let’s bundle all those features together into one nice big list and see who does what… this might end up being a work-in-progress, because in some cases, it’s not immediately obvious whether the features are included. If I’ve missed something, let me know.

Hard to draw any real conclusions from this matrix — WP E-commerce probably leads in terms of features, but those features come with a (resource) cost. Shopp looks like it might come second (in terms of featureset), and certainly covers the most payment gateways, but it’s also a reasonable investment (particularly purchase of a developer license). Given it’s commercial-only, it’s impossible to know what performance or memory usage is like.

Given that no single plugin covers all the possible features, I guess it’s very much a case of identifying the things that are important to you, then choose the plugin which best covers that featureset.

…At least, until YAK2 comes out, because that will do everything.

That’s a joke by the way.

More to come later, and do let me know if I’m made some glaringly obvious omissions.

Update #1: Added number of downloads, and project links.

Update #2: Changes to eShop features, kindly provided by Rich.

Update #3: Added info on WP E-commerce product search.

Update #4: Added info on Shopp, provided by Jonathon.

Update #5: Added iDeal to wp-ecommerce, i18n to eshop.

Update #6: Added 2 new YAK features