WordPress tees, hoodies, ornaments on sale now: wordpress.hellomerch.com
— WordPress(@WordPress) November 21, 2011
The miniscule amount of money it raises will help offset the cost of the buttons and stickers we send to WordCamps and meetups. http://wordpress.hellomerch.com
Basilakis 11:48 pm on November 21, 2011 Permalink
With Joomla and virtuemart instead of a WP Plugin! -.-
Jane Wells 11:50 pm on November 21, 2011 Permalink
If more people would pitch in to help clear out those last stubborn 3.3 bugs, maybe we’d have time to fix the wpswagstore that was built on wp.
Marko Heijnen 12:17 am on November 22, 2011 Permalink
If shipping to Europe will be cheaper then, we got a deal and I will try to help
Bill Dennen 3:35 pm on November 22, 2011 Permalink
Thanks for putting this store up.
Would you consider adding a link to the new, temporary store from the old one?
(I saw the link in my Twitter stream at some point, went to google to look for it later. Got the old store. Dead end.)
Thanks.
Jane Wells 4:50 pm on November 22, 2011 Permalink
Getting there.
Andrew Nacin 8:01 am on November 22, 2011 Permalink
While I wasn’t involved in this in any sense, I want to post some sort of an explanation here re: Joomla, so I have somewhere to point people who keep asking.
The swag store at wpswagstore.com is built on WP. The store for this holiday season is, clearly, not. Typically, merchandise was kept at Pier 38 and mailed by the fine folks at Automattic. Because of Automattic staffing changes and the closing of Pier 38 (all current merchandise is in storage — this is all new stuff), there was a need to re-route orders to a fulfillment center. In order to get this live as quickly as possible, a third-party service was used. Right now, every available core/community developer is working on version 3.3. No one is available to develop (and rapidly develop, at that) the existing swag store to get it up to speed for the current (and who knows, possibly transient) fulfillment situation. This is all just temporary.
And honestly, it’s not like we chose CafePress. Show a little love for fellow open source projects.
Jane Wells 2:37 pm on November 23, 2011 Permalink
While those things are true, it’s not the whole story. Let’s face it — WP core team doesn’t build the store, so our attention being on 3.3 is not really a factor. Here’s the real problem, and let this be a rallying cry to ecommerce developers around the world: ecommerce plugins need to be better!
We launched wpswagstore a while back using wpecommerce. Dan and Jeff at Instinct worked really hard on it (thanks guys) and it hummed along for a while. However, it ultimately wasn’t easy enough to update (product pics not being tied to media library was one big issue that they have since changed), and it didn’t support variations in a way that was working for us. After a year of a love-hate relationship, we decided to try another wp shopping plugin.
We’d heard good things about PHPurchase (later Cart66), so decided to give it a try. Those guys also were very responsive, fixing bugs we identified, etc. The different structure of setting up pages for each product was more work but also gave us more control, which was nice. However, getting info out of it for shipping was painful, and when they rewrote it, there was no upgrade path besides starting over and re-creating the store, not something we wanted to do. When staffing at Automattic changed, we decided to outsource the fulfillment/shipping instead of doing it ourselves, but the plugin’s reporting was not something that was usable enough in terms of having an outside entity handle our order fulfillment.
So we decided to try another wp shopping plugin. I asked @johnjamesjacoby to do a review of the major plugins, taking several things into account and ranking them. Based on this analysis, we decided we would try Shopp next. Then @johnjamesjacoby, who was the dev for the store, switched over to working on the Social Team at Automattic (they make Jetpack, HTML emails, etc), and there wasn’t anyone to do the work. So it’s basically waiting until I get that Community Handyman position filled and it can go on their task list. Unless someone wants to volunteer to do the Shopp integration, it will probably be a couple of months before it’s back on WordPress.
Have to agree with Nacin, though — don’t hate on Joomla! Free software should be supported. That said, the UI on the hello merch store is clunky and I miss our pretty site. Someday it will be back!
Gabriel Reguly 7:29 pm on November 23, 2011 Permalink
Hi Jane,
I am interested in doing the integration.
Regards,
Gabriel
P.S. Please remove the other comment, I was logged in with a different account
Gabriel Reguly 4:24 pm on November 22, 2011 Permalink
Thanks for the info Nacin.
I also was wondering why Joomla?, but did not had the spirit of posting it.
Keep up the work for 3.3.
Cheers,
Gabriel
WPTavern: WordPress Swag Store Open For Christmas Shopping | WordPress Planet 10:13 pm on November 22, 2011 Permalink
[...] when I mentioned that fact on Twitter. Andrew Nacin while not directly involved with the project has explained why the site is using Joomla through HelloMerch.com: The swag store at wpswagstore.com is built on [...]