Showcase: Remi Furniture
0 Comment(s) | published by Danny H. on Monday, August 23, 2010
Remi Furniture builds custom high quality furniture, using sustainable materials and practices.
Their work is truly beautiful and contemporary. All of the pieces are built to last. The timeless designs and quality craftsmanship means all of Remi's products are a great investment that won't need to be replaced in a few years.
We're going to do this showcase a little different than others, because Limewheel Creative was responsible for the design and LemonStand implementation. We'd probably be a little biased when answering the standard set of interview questions.
Project overview
Remi needed a website that would make the product photographs the hero and not get in the way. We designed a clean minimal design that does just that.
Products are displayed in a simple fashion, with large 3 levels of product images available: thumbnail, large and extra large in a lightbox. This allows the customer to see what they're ordering in detail.
Handling shipping
The size and weight of the products make it difficult to ship them long distances. To start out, Remi decided to only ship within the province of BC, but to offer this for free. This makes the checkout process and pricing simple.
To set this up, we create a shipping option that was free to anyone located in BC. We then removed all other provinces from the available list so customers outside of BC could not make a purchase.
Handling payment
Remi decided to start out using PayPal because it's an easy way to accept payment on an eCommerce site. We set up a simple PayPal standard payment method using LemonStand's built in support.
What Remi has to say
“Being a custom furniture builder, it was important for me to have a cart that allows for product configuration. LemonStand does this easily, out of the box, without plug-ins or modules. Adding a customizable product, with options and extras takes minutes. My favorite feature is the built in HTML editor and site content management system. It allows me to take full control of my entire website, and allows me to fully edit and even add on to the website. The site content is all laid out in a logical manner. Also, the frontend checkout system for the customers is beautifully laid out while remaining simple and clean. It's a great match to my products”
- Remi Michalowski, Owner – Remi Furniture
Showcase: Fair Trade Jewellery
0 Comment(s) | published by Danny H. on Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Fair Trade Jewellery Co. designs and creates ethical, environmentally sensitive custom, bridal, and engagement jewellery.
They promote sustainable community development by using premium Fair Mined Gold and Platinum from small artisanal mining communities in the Chocó rain forest, Colombia. Custom designs are made in our atelier using only Certified Canadian Diamonds, creating some of the most luxurious and exclusive socially conscious products in the world.
What is your opinion on LemonStand's template system?
"We were able to completely re-skin LemonStand without affecting our ability to take updates to the core codebase. So by virtue of that alone, we found it to be entirely flexible and a great environment in which to work."
Have you ever used other shopping carts such as Magento, CubeCart or others? If so, how do you think LemonStand compares?
"We tried other systems but they were not as easy to modify as LemonStand. We were, at one point, looking at Business Catalyst because their system had a slick back-end similar to LemonStand's. But the problem was it was based upon Microsoft technology and it was a hosted solution. We found it to be expensive and in their user forums there were lots of complaints about speed. We found speed issues were common with users of Magento as well.
Based upon all of our research, we found that LemonStand offered the same things we liked about Business Catalyst but with the advantage of being hosted on our own systems and the fact that it was written in PHP (we're a PHP shop)."
What are some of your favorite features of LemonStand, and why?
"What's best about LemonStand for us is the support. The whole system was good to start with. But the fact that when we needed new features implemented or help figuring out how to solve a problem, we had an answer within 24 hours was an amazing help in building our site. "
Did using LemonStand make your development process faster, more enjoyable, more creative, etc?
"Again, the fact that we had direct access and responses from the developer made our site build faster, more enjoyable and allowed us to build a site that looked the way we wanted it to look. It has been an unparalleled experience for us. And we have been developing sites for many years."
Would you recommend LemonStand to others who need an eCommerce site? Why?
"We would recommend Lemonstand because even with the default templates you get a presentable, easy-to-use site. And if you want to take it to the next level as you grow, you can make your site look however you want."
How does your client feel about using LemonStand? Do they have a favorite feature?
"Well, we are the client. We do our own development. So the previous answers cover this."
- Ryan Taylor, Founder –Fair Trade Jewellery Co.
How we maintain documentation
4 Comment(s) | published by Aleksey B. on Wednesday, August 04, 2010
From the beginning we understood that documentation is an important part of LemonStand. For software products which involve scripting, documentation is as significant as the product itself. That is why we started to look for suitable documentation tools from the earliest days of LemonStand.
Third-party tools
We decided to use a Wiki system, because it is flexible and allows us to maintain any documentation structure. Before we came to the current solution we tried different Wiki tools, like PBworks and Media Wiki. Media Wiki is an engine which is used by Wikipedia. We abandoned this engine very early, because it implies editing content using special tags, not in WYSIWYG mode.
In the beginning PBworks had us pretty excited. It's a really great Wiki engine with a beautiful user interface. It's inspiring and simple. I wrote many pages of documentation in PBworks when I started to realize that, unfortunately, PBworks does not satisfy all our needs. The key requirement for LemonStand documentation is displaying code examples. It is very difficult to edit code examples in a WYSIWYG editor. I also found that on occasion PBworks would break code examples when I would switch from read to edit mode.
Drinking our own lemonade
And then I decided to develop our own Wiki. We have a very flexible CMS engine, and can implement any functionality that we may need. The requirements for LemonStand's documentation Wiki were:
- WYSIWYG editing
- simple code examples editing
- easy linking
- automatic TOC and sub-TOC generating
- search, including the code examples
- commenting feature
- general simplicity and productivity
I was even surprised by how many things were already done in LemonStand. It only took a few days to develop and implement the Wiki module for LemonStand. Now we have a Wiki module which can display pages, TOCs and code examples. We can edit any page or create a new page using special links below a Wiki article, right from the web site:
The most interesting thing is the code example feature. Editing code examples in WYSIWYG mode is not very efficient. Instead, I developed special tags which we use when we need to include code examples on a page:
wiki_source_block(post_function_example, Post function example, php)
The Wiki recognizes these tags and when I click the Edit code examples link on the Wiki page, it displays a page with a code editor with the syntax highlighter for each code block defined on the page.
The new Wiki was a real breakthrough for us! Now it literally takes seconds to create a new page or update code examples. It allows us to efficiently maintain the documentation with our limited resources. This leaves more time for product development and other important things.
Could you use this module?
If enough people are interested, we would consider sharing the module with everyone. Let us know if you would find this useful!
Free developer licenses have arrived
0 Comment(s) | published by Danny H. on Monday, August 02, 2010
As we promised a few months ago, we've continued offering a way to try out LemonStand for free.
Developer licenses allow you to evaluate LemonStand for a particular project, or develop modules and themes without buying a commercial license.
There's just one hitch: you can only have 10 active orders in the system. That's the only limitation! We felt this was pretty reasonable, considering we're providing an unadulterated version of LemonStand for free. If you need to go above 10 orders for testing, you can simply delete old test orders. Or upgrade to a commercial license. Which brings me to my next point.
Developer installations can be upgraded
That means you can use a developer license to evaluate LemonStand for a particular project, then seamlessly upgrade it to a commercial copy. So all the work you put into implementing your HTML/CSS theme and configuring settings needn't go to waste.
1 license = 1 website
As with the commercial license, each developer license can only be used for a single website. A "single website" = 2 environments, typically. So you could set up a test environment, and a dev environment, perhaps. This will also ensure that if you upgrade your license in the future, it will go smoothly.
Technical details
To run a developer copy of LemonStand, you'll need either ZendGuard or IonCube PHP loader to be installed. The developer version contains a few encrypted files, whereas the commercial version does not contain any encrypted files.
To install LemonStand developer version and ensure compatibility on your server, you can read this article.
Developer licenses are the new beta
During the beta program, licenses were free. But installations using a key that is in "beta" status cannot be updated anymore.
To fix that, just log into your account, click on the license, and convert it to a developers license.
This will apply the order # limit. That this is why we've kept this optional.
After you convert your license to a developer version, you must force update your installations for the changes to take affect.
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