Zactonz Number Plates for WooCommerce

Requirements#

• WordPress 7.0 or newer and PHP 7.4 or newer.
• WooCommerce 9.6 or newer, installed and active. The plugin declares WooCommerce as a required plugin, so WordPress will not activate it without WooCommerce.
• GD with FreeType, which almost every host has, for the PNG picture of the plate in the cart, checkout and email. Without it the plugin shows the vector on the web and leaves the picture out of the email rather than sending a broken one.

Install the plugin#

This plugin is awaiting review for the WordPress plugin directory. The directory steps below are the route once it is listed; until then, install it from the plugin zip.

From the dashboard, go to Plugins › Add New, search for Zactonz Number Plates for WooCommerce and click Install Now, then Activate.

With WP-CLI:

wp plugin install zactonz-number-plates-for-woocommerce --activate

To install manually, upload the folder to /wp-content/plugins/zactonz-number-plates-for-woocommerce/ and activate it from the Plugins menu.

Make a product a number plate#

1. Edit a product and open the Number plate tab in Product data.
2. Tick Sell as a number plate.
3. Choose the country. Germany is the profile that ships.
4. Choose a layout for the configurator: Stacked, Studio or Guided. See Layouts & artwork.
5. Set surcharges per size or per plate type if you want them. Leave them blank for one flat price.
6. Publish. The configurator appears on the product page.

Nothing else is configured. Plate sizes, cap heights and the typeface come from the regulation, not from a settings screen, so there is no size to type in and nothing to get wrong.

What a shopper sees#

The product page shows the plate drawn at its real proportions, redrawn as the shopper types. Plate type and size are radio groups. An unknown district code, a registration too long for the plate type or a size that cannot fit what was typed is reported at once, and the price for the exact configuration updates with each change. A plate that would be impossible to manufacture cannot be added to the cart, because the same validation runs again on the server.

On a block theme, WooCommerce's Add to Cart block sees the configurator's form fields and renders an ordinary form instead of its no-reload path. That is WooCommerce's own fallback and is what makes the same fields work on classic and block themes alike.

Where the plate appears#

Everywhere the order is shown: the cart, the checkout, the order confirmation, the order email, the customer's account page and the order screen in your admin. It is a PNG, because no mail client of consequence renders SVG, and the link beside it always opens the full-size vector. On the Cart and Checkout blocks the plate takes the place of the product photograph, because those blocks render line item details through a component that allows no images.

Download the artwork#

Open the order and find the plate line. Beside the drawing is Download plate artwork (SVG). The file is measured in millimetres and every character is a filled shape taken from the bundled font, so it renders identically in a cutter, a plotter or a browser and needs no font installed.

Remove the plugin#

Deleting the plugin leaves your product settings alone, because deleting a plugin is usually how it gets replaced. To remove them as well, define ZCTZ_NP_REMOVE_DATA as true in wp-config.php before you delete:

define( 'ZCTZ_NP_REMOVE_DATA', true );

Orders are never touched either way. Each order line records the rules it was configured under, so its artwork stays available after the product changes or is deleted.