Marketpress Hack for Catalyst Theme

The Catalyst Theme is an insanely customizable theme, or framework. Better than Thesis in my opinion. However, for many people it’s been hard to find a suitable shopping cart for catalyst. Shopping cart plugins in general are a pain in the shhhh. Especially when you consider that many shopping carts cost over $200 for a developers license.

I’ve been a supporter of ‘WPMU Dev’ for awhile now and use their marketpress plugin on all of my eCommerce sites. You can pick up the Marketpress Plugin for $35. It works right out of the box on most themes. However, the Catalyst framework has two issues with the marketpress plugin:

(1) It prevents the plugin from displaying a list of products by category. This is a big issue since most of us will use categories as our nav menu (Mens Shoes, Womens Shoes, Mens Shirts, etc). But don’t worry, I was determined to use Catalyst and Marketpress together and so I created a workaround…

Are you ready?
Use shortcodes. lol. Yep thats it. You can find the available shortcodes here: Admin panel | products | store settings | shortcode tab. Grab the code; Create a page and insert the shortcode onto that page. Don’t put anything else on the page. Example, Lets say that you want to have a menu option that will display all of your products that have a category of “mens shoes”, You would create a page and insert the following shortcode into that page:

[mp_list_products paginate="true" page="1" per_page="10" order_by="price" order="DESC" category="mens-shoes"]

Now add the page to your nav menu and when people click on it, they will be shown a list of all of your products that have the category, “mens shoes”.

(2) The second issue is that it oddly displays some of the shopping cart text at the top of the page. The theme designer gave a simple fix for this in the forums… Just add the below code to the “custom functions” file (themes/dynamik/custom-functions.php):

remove_filter( 'wp_title', 'catalyst_site_title_wrap', 20 );
add_filter( 'wp_title', 'catalyst_site_title_wrap', 100 );

That’s it. Now go fix your site. :)