It’s finally here, my first e-shop. This WordPress adventure has reached its first milestone.
E-commerce layer
Shopify, WooCommerce, OpenCart, Cartridge, etc. There is so many options to make an e-shop that it’s hard to choose. I have no idea how people make a decision in this situation. I feel like that without making a project with each one of them, I cannot truly evaluate pros and cons of each of them.
I finally decided to go with WooCommerce. The deciding factor was that I wanted to be able to make posts. I wanted not just an e-shop, but a blog alongside it. So, I believed that WooCommerce was the perfect fit for this hybrid approach. And It delivered!
WordPress Experience
The Music Shop, alongside the blog, were a great introduction to WordPress. Even though I am a developer and that I want to dive myself into code, I still see value to know a bit of this platform. WordPress allowed me to build and deploy both a blog and an e-shop in such a short time ! No surprise so much of internet is running it. It’s a great tool !
However, I have to admit, I didn’t enjoy the process. I felt more like a sysadmin than a developer. I did not write a single line of code, and this is incredible for sure. But the fun was not there. Also, It was not that easy to customize. I am convince that I can do almost anything without writing any code, even with only free plugins, but it comes with some struggles. WordPress has a learning curve.
Theme customization was my biggest struggle. Every single piece of front element has options, making it a tedious learning process. At some point, I fond myself longing my HTML-CSS. It is possible to write custom CSS directly into WordPress, but it did not felt like using the CMS correctly, so I kept using WordPress native utilities. And if believe it’s possible to do anything with it, I just did not enjoy the workflow.
WooCommerce
It is slow. But it has all the capabilities that you would want from an e-shop. The lack of speed from it comes mainly that my server does not have enough resources. It realistically require at least 2GB of RAM. Since this music shop was originally built as a learning experiment rather than a live business, I’ll stick with my low-resources server for now.
LAMP Stack
Because my main goal is to hone my technical skills, I chose a VPS to host my projects. This require me more configuration, but it deepen my understanding of the environment where my code actually runs.
For this project, I chose the traditional LAMP stack to run it. To my surprise, I struggled to find a full walktrough of “Installing WordPress with LAMP Stack on a VPS”. I had to piece togheter different documentations to get the job done. Unfortonately, some specific configuration to make this architecture run smoothly were missing. So I had issues, missing plugins, default configuration that were making it not running (and throw no error message 😠).
Nowadays, many hosting providers offer pre-configured WordPress instances making the deployment effortless. Maybe that convenience is why people do not write about manual VPS installation anymore. That’s a bit unfortunate, because I believe bypassing the setup leaves developers less aware of how the underlying infrastructure works. Meddling a bit with Mysql and Apache definitely deepened my understanding. Perhaps one day, If I am willing to, I’ll write the guide I wish I had. After all, that’s what this blog is for.
Plugins
Plugins are where WordPress start to be a super-tool. Whenever a specific feature is required, good chance that someone has already built a plugin for it. And in the rare case they haven’t, you can build it. I believe that this combination : WordPress paired with (custom) plugin, offer an incredibly rapid way to deploy specialized websites.
Mails
For an e-shop, automated mails are an absolute requirement. Everyone universally recommends using a dedicated SMTP to do so. I was curious why. So I took a look into it. By default, PHP use the local mail server : a self-hosted mail service. I peeked inside what this means and I could make one. I changed my mind very rapidely. Mailing system on internet will stay as a black box for me. Building a self hosted mail service may be one of the most arduous personal project a developer can choose to tackle.
Conclusion
WordPress is a undeniably a great tool ! Alongside it’s massive plugin ecosystem, it offers many customization and capabilities without writing a single line of code. But for me, that’s exactly the catch: no code is no fun.