Cartel

Lightweight, security-conscious eCommerce for WordPress. A free alternative to WooCommerce and its paid extensions.

Description

Cartel is a fast, no-bloat commerce plugin: one-page checkout, instant Buy Now, payment processing (Stripe + Manual/Offline, with a pluggable gateway architecture), order status workflow, digital-download fulfillment with signed expiring links, order-confirmation and status-update emails, multi-currency pricing, per-zone shipping, customer accounts with order history (plus guest order lookup), reCAPTCHA + Mailchimp integrations, stock + order management, and WooCommerce-compatible CSV import/export.

Installation

1. Upload the cartel folder to /wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu.
3. Visit Cartel → Payment methods to activate and configure a payment gateway (Manual/Offline works out of the box; add your Stripe keys for card payments).
4. Visit Cartel → Settings to configure currency, shipping zones, emails, captcha, and mailing-list integrations.

Changelog

0.2.3

• Storefront UI: fixed the checkout layout squeezing into 184px columns under themes that constrain the checkout to a narrow content area, by switching the 3-column grid to a container query keyed to the checkout's own rendered width. Fixed "Add to cart", "Buy now", and "Place order" buttons rendering with the host theme's default crimson/outline button style instead of the design system's solid indigo/amber, by scoping those button selectors to their containing component for higher specificity than the theme's [type="button"]/[type="submit"] resets.
• Orders: the admin order-detail "Billing" section now falls back to the checkout's shipping address when no separate billing address was collected, instead of always showing "—".

0.2.1

• Storefront UI: redesigned public/assets/hal-cartel.css with a card-based layout and a colour system aligned with the admin's design language — product cards, buttons, checkout sections, shipping/payment selection rows, the Stripe card field, the order-confirmation screen, and order-history all restyled. Order-status badges ([hal_cartel_my_orders]) now share the same badge styling as the admin order list.

0.2.0

• Payments: pluggable gateway architecture (Hal_Cartel_Gateway/Hal_Cartel_Gateways), a Manual/Offline gateway active by default, and a Stripe gateway with PaymentIntents, signed + idempotent webhook handling, and an abandoned-pending-payment-order cleanup cron that restocks and fails stale orders.
• Orders: full status workflow (pending payment → on hold/processing → completed/cancelled/refunded/failed) with an admin order-detail view and status-change action.
• Fulfillment: digital downloads are granted as signed, expiring tokens when an order completes, redeemable through a public account-free streaming endpoint with download-count and expiry enforcement.
• Emails: order-received, new-order-alert, and status-update notifications via Hal_Cartel_Emails, with admin-configurable recipient address and per-type on/off toggles, and download links appended automatically for completed digital-goods orders.
• Integrations: reCAPTCHA v2 verification and Mailchimp list opt-in are now wired into checkout (previously placeholder-only settings).
• Accounts: opt-in customer-account creation at checkout, an order-history [hal_cartel_my_orders] shortcode for logged-in shoppers, and a guest order-number + email lookup for account-free order tracking and re-downloads.
• Multi-currency pricing and per-zone shipping rates, carried through checkout, order totals, and admin order views.

0.1.0

• Initial scaffold: product CPT, cart, REST API, one-page checkout shortcode, admin UI, WooCommerce-compatible CSV import/export.