Life can be quite difficult for the Webmaster who needs a simple solution for tracking inventory. Sure, there are tons of e-commerce and shopping-cart plugins out there (many of which are highly overrated, in my humble opinion). But as far as a basic, inventory manager that’s fluent and reliable, there just isn’t anything out there for this niche. Or, at least that’s what I thought…

Enter the “Inventory Manager Plugin” for Wordpress, and its creator, Cale Bergh of the Alpha Channel Group.

To merely brag on Cale’s expertise would do him no justice! Cale is an all-around guy…professional, personable, and just so happens to be a gifted developer! While in pursuit of developing my own Inventory plugin, I stumbled across his Alpha Channel Group website by sheer chance! To say the least, my experience working with Cale was awesome!

Cale was highly responsive and flexible regarding the enhancement of his Inventory Manager plugin, which has been out there for quite some time. The plugin—even in its early state—was exactly what I had in mind, sans a few additional features. I shared these ideas with Cale and he immediately began working on the builds, keeping the end-user at the forefront of his efforts. As his beta-tester, I was able to witness the expansion of the Inventory Manager to its current state. And while it is still in its early stages, I am certain this plugin has the potential of becoming just as popular as Instinct’s ecommerce and eShop’s shopping cart at quirm.net. Yes…It really is that good!

The main treat about the Inventory Manager is that it runs independently. If you’ve worked with ecommerce or shopping-cart plugins, then you know exactly what I’m suggesting here! Inventory Manager isn’t entangled with Wordpress’ Posts or Pages functions…which is the last thing you need when you’re operating an autonomous, inventory system. With Inventory Manager, you control your products, quantities, and categories from a distinct sub-menu in Wordpress’ Dashboard.

Another cool feature is the product display option, which allows you to display inventory items and their descriptions in a spreadsheet or grid view. You can even customize the number of items to be displayed on each page! Each item is clickable and leads the user to it’s description page, where all of its details can be viewed.

The ability to reserve inventory items is arguably the plugin’s most powerful feature. Emails are immediately sent to the webmaster and product owner, informing them of the product name, description, SKU number, and even the quantity the User would like to purchase!

Other notable features are as follows:

The administrator may…
- Define a placeholder image
- Restrict users from editing inventory items that don’t belong to them
- Choose the lowest role (Administrator, Editor, etc) with inventory management capabilities
- Utilize a comma-delineated, bulk upload feature that supports .csv and .txt formats

Everyone will enjoy…
- The ability to upload multiple images for an inventory item
- The ability to Sort by Category feature
- The ability to Sort by Price (High-to-Low, Low-to-High)
- The ability to Sort by Item Name
- The ability to Sort by Manufacturer

To download the Inventory Manager, please visit http://alphachannelgroup.com/wp/inventory_manager.html. Thanks, Cale!