Questions about user integration with Woocommerce

[xwhitesky]

Hello, we are currently building an ecommerce site using Wordpress & Woocommerce to sell downloadable products.

The main site runs on Wordpress in the root, and I have Xenforo installed at /forum for the community section. So far this plugin looks like it achieves everything I could ask for -- except alternately handling user registrations from WP and sending those to the XF database.

I am very much hoping to purchase this product ASAP but I'm a bit hesitant because I don't know if moving user registration off WP and onto Xen only will complicate things.. since Woocommerce (shop system) is built in Wordpress, the most critical features (user registration, history, licenses, files, payments, address, etc) would be done here. Also registration is also prompted in the cart upon purchase of items.. in other words, user authentication is heavily entwined with Woocommerce. Many customers may not even visit the forum, and use the site strictly for shopping.

As it looks, I'd have to likely direct registrations off the cart to Xenforo, and use a redirect to come back to the shop after registration, which produces another question, how to differentiate people registering on Xenforo to checkout in Woocommerce vs those registering in general on the forum?

I'm also a bit concerned about plugins like Buddypress for example, and any plugins or features that get updated upon either registration or profile updating in WP - if that is all done via Xenforo, would these processes still be triggered in Wordpress?

Is there any chance of having optional ability to send WP users to Xenforo database in a future release?

If anyone else has similar issues or experience, I'd love to hear your input.

Regards,

 

[Gracie]

In principle, integrating WooCommerce and XenForo requires a few steps:

1. Template edits to remove login / logout from WordPress.
2. Insert widgets in design for login from XenForo
3. Alignment of all customers (database work to align user_id and ID).

WooCommerce also adds a custom role in WordPress. There is a user mapping feature in XenWord that allows a XenForo member to be mapped as a customer.

Since XenWord adds to the usermeta table, and WooCommerce add to the usermeta table then user alignment will be vital. No one should register from WordPress -- and all older customers would need to be aligned in XenForo. Depending on the size of the former customers then this can be a big task.

Please see the PM from me with a copy of XenWord 3.0.3 alpha. This is for testing on your local development environment only. It will also help you see how to integrate things.

In terms of WP -> XF, @LPH has stated several times that it is a goal but requires synchronization code that he hasn't developed or is comfortable with in design. He's currently focused on the comments array and tinkering around the edges until he can figure out the array. It would be a big shift in how XenWord currently works.

I'd caution that you are looking at a lot of design work. It's possible but will depend upon the size of your site and customer base.

 

[xwhitesky]

Hello and thanks a lot for the feedback. Glad to hear about the customer mapping feature as that would be really important.

Luckily in our case there are are no previous customers (new business project from scratch) so the databases will be clean and hopefully should eliminate all the alignment worries. Template edits shouldn't be too bad as I'm very familiar with theme design, though my biggest concern is making sure that registration during checkout won't be interrupted and can be somehow made to flow seamlessly.

Will post back after some testing, thanks again.