E commerce solution

I’m not familiar with live composer, but I have customized Woocommerce pages. Woocommerce requires many specific elements on their templates to work correctly. I’d be very surprised if live composer is that tightly integrated with Woocommerce.

With Woocommerce templates, the less you fight the defaults, the better off you are. I suspect live composer constitutes a major bout. The best way to customize Woo is to leave the content alone and achieve what you want with CSS only. The next best way is to use some of the many hooks and filters to do what you want with content. This means writing custom code.

You can make template overrides which give you more flexibility, but doing so adds to the amount of maintenance needed after updates. And these templates still need to have the essential Woo elements, you cannot simply override with a live composer page without providing these elements.

You can certainly create custom content that fits around the Woo elements, but to edit the actual Woo elements I’d have to say live composer would be one of the worst choices. Sorry ??

Thanks for the response. Can you recommend a page builder where I could customize woo elements on the front end, like live composer? I’m an absolute neophyte when it comes to web design and writing custom code would be disastrous.

I started on a blank theme so I would have complete control over the layout and I could experiment with and customize the look that I want. It worked out fine until I had to develop the ecommerce element of my site. If I were to start over, could you recommend a setup where I would be able to achieve this? To be able to customize all my pages, including shop, checkout and cart pages on the front end? Is there a better page builder for my needs? Should I be using a blank theme? Will woo offer me enough flexibility to customize my product and shop pages?

Woocommerce has lots of flexibility… for a coder. Maybe I’m missing something because I’m unfamiliar with live composer and the like, but I just can’t imagine such a composer working with Woo unless it was specifically coded just for Woocommerce. Maybe it can partly work in setting CSS styles. CSS can change appearance in big ways without touching content. It is the content generated by Woo that I’m skeptical of there being a way to WYSIWYG edit.

As you surmised, a blank theme is great for working with a page builder. Unfortunately, it’s probably the worst thing for Woocommerce styling. It’s not a total loss. The main thing a more complete theme would provide is header, footer, sidebar content and styling. All this is easily incorporated into Woo pages. None of this helps or detracts from Woo’s content.

Of course Woo does have its own CSS for much content, and they do offer a color plugin so you can more easily set custom colors for Woo elements. This is of course not the same as a page composer, but it’s something.

The best advice I could offer is take the Woo content for what it is and do your best to incorporate it as is into your design schemes. If you need to alter something, hopefully it’s just colors. If you need more, CSS can do a lot, but that in itself is coding, which I know you are staying as far away from as possible.

If you were to dabble in coding just a little bit, CSS wouldn’t be too bad. Any errors in CSS will not crash your site. All modern browsers have some sort of CSS evaluation tool that makes it easy to try different things without any need to edit and upload files. Once you determine the right styles, you would still have to edit a file and upload it. The advantage is you don’t have to do so for trials, only once the needed code is finalized.

The drawback of CSS is it’s more “fuzzy” than true computer code. Most computer code, if you code something to happen, it happens. With CSS, it might happen, depending on other factors which may not be known to you.

I imagine you now wondering if there is an e-commerce plugin that will work with some page builder app. Not that I know of, and that’s a poor way to approach the problem. We’re talking about real money and real customers here. You want to start with the best e-commerce package available and figure out a way to make the rest work.

You might consider doing everything you can to design your site and get Woo to conform to your will, then bring in some professional help to manage what necessary Woo changes remain. If you can keep these changes to a minimum, the pro help may not be too expensive. A good resource for pro help is jobs.wordpress.net.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 12 months ago by bcworkz. Reason: typos

Thanks for the comprehensive response. I’d like to incorporate the woo content into my theme like you said, but woocommerce won’t integrate with my theme for some reason. I’ve been trying to contact live composer support for the past week, but frankly their support has been sub-par. Since it’s their blank theme that I’m using, I figured they could help me out but they take days to respond.

If I could just get woo integrated with my theme that would solve my problem. I’m thinking maybe I should start over and use a woocommerce theme. Or maybe try out a different page builder that will integrate with woocommerce better. Either way, I’m going to wait for LC support to get back to me, and if they don’t, I’ll explore different options then. Thanks for the help!

You’re welcome. Best of luck to you!