www.NamasteMofo.com
Over the weekend my partners Switchblade Creative Studios and I launched the new design and WordPress-powered NamasteMofo.com! The new design balances cutting edge punk rock design with an intuitive structure that allows potential buyers to find and purchase punk rock yoga clothes easily. It’s a perfect example of how a site can have a rough and not boxy design and yet still be powered by WordPress and/or other templating systems. Now, go buy some punk rock yoga gear right now!
While not the first commerce site I’ve worked on, it was the first one truly run by WordPress and probably the last one I’d create using the bulky plugin called WP e-Commerce by Instinct. Granted the plugin is open-source and developed by the community eager to lend a hand and it’s getting there, but to anyone wanting a slick, WordPress-integrated e-commerce solution that they want full control over, this still may not be the plugin for you.
To be sure, the basic install is quick and easy and full of great features that handle not only physical products you may want to sell, but also digital downloads. The system also integrated fully with a variety of payment fulfillment centers like PayPal, Authorize and Google Checkout. Out of the box, you’ll get what about 80% of users would want. However, that last 20% — those of us who want to design it, modify it and make the check out process exactly to our liking — therein lies some problems.
NamasteMofo.com was one of those sites who’s creative edge and design demanded much more from this plugin than the vast majority of users. If you poke around the store of the site, you’ll notice several major differences from the vanilla install. Not only has the design been changed (often easily enough through modification of the CSS), but major bits of the store had to be faked and duplicated. For example, while the nifty DropCart was added as a paid addition, my clients need to also have standard readout of shopping cart items and a checkout link. But with e-Commerce, if you choose the DropShop often, you don’t get a standard cart view — you can’t have both.
Basically, the designers of WP e-Commerce has decided for you the best way for your customers to navigate the store. My professional experience as a web designer, product manager and just as a general online shopper doesn’t agree with their assessment. But alright, no problem, we’ll just crack our knuckles and get to some code hacking right? Right.
However, this proved to be a particular challenge with the way this plugin’s code was written. For my fellow developers out there, here were the major problems I found with modifying the code:
- Lack of Documentation. Sure there’s a forum and a documentation project, but neither of which tells you simple things like “to change the output of X, look in file Y.”
- Lack of helpful code comments. Similar to above. Code comments were sparse and if present were cryptic at best. Finding the code you needed to modify was an exercise in trial and error.
- Updating the code, wipes out all your changes! The most frustrating thing about e-Commerce is the way to update the code when a new version is out is apparently to copy out all the files you modified. Update the source files and then hunt around to put your modified code back and cross your fingers hoping they didn’t change a function on you.
As you can see, WP e-Commerce is a web developer’s nightmare. I say again that with patience and perseverance, one can make things happen with the code as you can see on NamasteMofo.com, but if I had to do it all over again, I would most likely leave commerce in the hands of the experts, like shopify.com!
Tags: authorize, e-commerce, google checkout, namaste, paypal, plugins, wordpress, wp e-commerce, yoga
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