At the end of my WordCamp San Francisco talk, I said I had a dream. A dream about a plugin that can share an inventory between WordPress sites on a Multisite Network.
Imagine, if you will, a store with a physical products (Geisha dolls). The store has a bunch of different types of dolls. The store has satellite stores, one in Ariel (their flagship store) but now one on Bellerophon and another on Whitefall. While the Companion-Style dolls sell well on Ariel and Bellerophon, the Cowboy-Style ones sell best on Whitefall. Also each store has a different kind of clientele.
So the Dollhouse Store makes a website, and then using Multisite, makes another site for each location: whitefall.dollhousestores.com and so on (or maybe whitefalldollhouse.com even). At first, the webpages are just a list of the local store products, come and buy them here, photos of the locale, employees, and local events. Then they decide to sell stuff on line. But they only want to list items for sale under specific criteria.
- All items for sale are stored on the network admin
- Each store can select what products they have at their store
- Each store controls product volume.
- Stores can request more product from homebase
Now of course they could have a separate store for each site, but they want to manage what possible items could be sold online, so having that controlled by the network makes sense, doesn’t it?
Meanwhile another store sells cows. All the cows live at Persephone, and are shipped out to Jiangyin and other stores. They’re doing well with everyone going to cowship.com, but they too want to have jiangyin.cowship.com and so on. Each store lists what cows are for sale that live well in each location because Holsteins’ don’t like Bellerophon, who knew? This way, someone on Jiangyin can order Holsteins but not Texas Longhorns. Obviously they need to control which product can be sold at each location, same as the Dollhouse, but they also have a different problem. Their product amounts must also be stored in one location and shipped out from there, so they want to make sure they don’t oversell their cows.
Their criteria:
- All items for sale are stored on the network admin
- Network admin controls absolute amount of products
- Network selects what products they have at each store
- Orders per store base product volume on the network amount
These are pipe dreams. Today there is no plugin that ‘shares’ an estore across multisite sites on a network. You can’t even do it with ‘digital’ products which now that I say it aloud, I think Pippin should totally get on that.
Today, all sites are separate, and since estores have their content saved per-site, there isn’t an easy, friendly way (if there is at all) to pull data between sites in a way that preserves shopping carts and such. I wish there was. I get asked about this at least once a week, and I have to say “Today, there is no plugin that can share an inventory between WordPress sites on a Multisite Network.”
But this is a complicated thing. Multisite itself isn’t actually built to handle that kind of thing, since the network doesn’t have posts or pages. You’d have to dedicate a site on the network to the shop and pull in content from there, which of course has a switch_to_blog() overhead penalty. I can’t even begin to get past the paper thoughts I have here.
Because the core team who wrote the update script learned from their mistakes in the past. The changes made in WordPress may be bold and large, but they’re also done carefully. Instead of just saying ‘What’s done gets into the new version,’ 3.7 took the ‘feature teams’ trend started a few releases back to the next level. Only if the feature was done-done did it get into 3.7. This meant that while we did not have a major ‘feature’ this release (like we did with the Media Release in 3.5), we had the opportunity to make each feature rock solid on it’s own. And this worked better than many expected because of “features as plugins.”
Next I customize my ‘publicize’ lede. This has to be good and it has to be short. I know I’m using my helf.us yourls, so the URL itself will be tiny, but that doesn’t mean I should use just my title for Twitter. I customize it, trying to make it a little more witty and pithy, to reflect me and my readers. Finally I customize my excerpt. Oh yes, my excerpts are all custom written, and they are intended to grab you hard. Like Yoast, I feel the only well written description is a hand written one, and I do it. For everything.
