Short version:
Longer version:
You will need a WordPress website with WooCommerce installed and active. While Mycelia will run on older versions of WordPress and WooCommerce, the latest testing was done on WordPress 6.0.0 and Woocommerce 7.0.0 so it is recommended that you update to at least these versions.
Mycelia was also tested from PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.2. If you are running an older version of PHP, Mycelia may not function as intended. It's worth noting that the oldest PHP version with security support is PHP 8.0 so if you are running an older version it recommended that you upgrade as soon as possible. Contact your hosting provider/IT team for help with this.
You'll also need your Phorest API credentials. Reach out to Phorest support by email (api-requests@phorest.com) and they'll provide it to you.
Simply reach out to the good folks at Phorest using this email api-requests@phorest.com and let them know you want API credentials for your site.
It's worth noting that Phorest have support for a development API account with dummy content so you can test out syncing back and forth on a demo site without impacting any production product stock data.
Currently, only products under the category "Retail" will sync to WooCommerce (and vice-versa).
You must have a valid license for automatic scheduled syncing to function. Once your license expires, the scheduled syncing feature will no longer work (though most other features will be available).
Mycelia customers with a valid license are also entitled to download all feature updates and critical security patches as they release, as well as customer support.
Mycelia is not developed or supported by the Phorest team. If you have any questions/issues about this plugin, reach out to us by opening a support ticket or emailing labs@403page.com and we'll be happy to help!
Every time a sync runs it looks up your stock data over the Phorest API. To keep the plugin performant, it will perform a "difference-check" comparing the latest data from Phorest to the data that was sent on the previous sync. If no changes were made to the stock/products since the last sync - Mycelia will stop the process.
By default Mycelia only updates WooCommerce stock if there has been a change of Phorest product data between the runtime and the previous runtime (rather than checking if WooCommerce stock has changed which would be substantially more compute intensive).
There may be a situation where someone on your team has modified your WooCommerce stock causing it to fall out of parity with Phorest - however, Mycelia will not correct the disparity until a change is detected on the Phorest side. We have added an option to disabled the ability to change stock values in WooCommerce specifically for this reason.
When you enable "force sync" the difference check is skipped and Mycelia will perform the sync regardless of whether there were changes or not.
Ideally, this should just be used for troubleshooting purposes and not permanently enabled as a force sync takes longer and uses more of your computational resources, potentially slowing your site down if you're running on modest/shared hardware.
When dry run mode is enabled - performing a sync will run through the process of a regular sync, respecting all your other settings but it simply won't store the changes to your site. This allows you to see what would have happened if you performed a live sync.
Dry run mode is enabled by default on plugin activation, so if you ever disable the plugin and reenable it, you'll need to uncheck the dry run option again.
Scheduled syncs run in the background utilising wp-cron. You can set the interval for the regular sync as well as the start time and end time for syncing. This is useful because there are likely times of the day when you're not moving physical products and stock isn't changing in your physical clinic/salon. It is good practice to set the syncing mode to just before your physical business opens and just after it closes each day. This preserves bandwidth and gives the API a break when it's not required.
Many hosting environments have a limit on how long a PHP process can run for. On shared hosting, this is often 30 to 60 seconds. If you have a lot of products you may find the initial sync takes longer than this limit. You can use this feature to attempt to override the limit just for the syncing process if your hosting provider allows for it.
In our tests we found 100 products take about 15 seconds to pull down and sync into WooCommerce on very modest hardware (single core Intel server with 1GB of memory) whereas 1,000 products took about 60 seconds.
The upstream option hooks into the WooCommerce checkout and sends the order along with the customer's information to Phorest, allowing you to keep all your sales records in one place. You will need to select a "Web agent" for processing these orders. The web agent can be any of your staff in Phorest, though it may be a good idea to create a new "staff member" called "Website sales" and assign that in Mycelia to avoid any confusion.
The same goes for the Shipping product & Payment method option.
Phorest doesn't natively support shipping, so you should create a product in Phorest called "Shipping" and set that as your Payment Product. Whenever a shipping cost is applied to a WooCommerce order, it will be sent to Phorest as a line item using this product.
When a sale is made, Mycelia looks up your Phorest client list to see if they already exist (by their email). If they do, the order is associated with their account - otherwise a new customer is created in Phorest. This process also reduces the stock levels automatically of whatever was included in the sale.
Phorest doesn't natively support shipping, so you should create a product in Phorest called "Shipping" and set that as your Shipping Product. Whenever a shipping cost is applied to a WooCommerce order, it will be sent to Phorest as a line item using this product as the line item.
Currently, Mycelia only supports one physical location per WooCommerce site. We plan to add support for multiple locations, along with a customer-facing stock check per location in an upcoming version this year.
Us too! I'm glad you asked! You can add the following line to your wp-config.php.
Go to the line:
/* That's all, stop editing! Happy publishing. */
...and add the following right above it:
define( 'mycelia_pho_pass_key', 'YOUR_PASSWORD_HERE' );
No. The developer of this plugin (403Page Labs) has no access to your Phorest API as the Mycelia plugin runs in a stand-alone state on your WordPress/WooCommerce site.
Mycelia does not process data outside of the Phorest API and your WordPress site so it does not introduce any additional legal burden that would make your site fall out of GDPR compliance. However, you are required to disclose in your Terms of Service and/or Privacy Policy that Phorest is a data processor during and after checkout (if you have Upstream to Phorest enabled).
With this in mind you should disclose that Phorest is a data processor on your site to remain GDPR compliant.
Phorest have a great resource for compliance here and some more general advice on how Phorest processes date here.
Absolutely! You can set a Unix cron to run the WP-CLI command wp mycelia sync at whatever interval you like - or wget/curl the endpoint yourself by selecting Self-managed instead.. We have a whole section dedicated to crons - take a look.
If you have a publicly accessible domain for your staging/development/testing environment that does not match the above format, open a support ticket and we'd be happy to whitelist that domain too.
Bare in mind, you only need an active/valid license in instances where you need to enable scheduled syncing. The rest of the functionality can be tested without a valid license.
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