Mastodawn

My word, I have no idea how anyone achieves anything online independent of huge corporations. I'm working with the new version of a widely used ecomm platform. The underlying code is good (unlike anything running under WP), but so far I've offered a patch for their upgrade tool, identified a less than user-friendly issue with the upgrade process, and found a fairly serious bug, which I worked around with the most horrid kludge: manually adding stuff to the database. Then I patched a theme to fix something I found irksome.

So that's required: GitHub, PHP, PHPUnit, Bootstrap based SCSS with webpack, SQL, Smarty and a few other things.

I'm not exactly a "full stack" developer; I can rock the back end and know just enough to tweak things on the front end, but don't ask me to build something from scratch. Getting this thing going has tapped every single one of those skills.

But what if you're just someone with no development skills who is trying to get a small shop online? This leaves you out in the woods, and subject to paying Shopify (and similar megacorps) stupid money just to get a store that might never sell a damn thing going.

#eCommerce #rant

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Isaac Ji Kuo

@alan I may just be ignorant of what's out there, but it sure would be nice if we had community projects for community owned and operated e-commerce.

Maybe it's already a thing and I'm just ignorant of it?

I dunno ... this feels like something that doesn't scale down very well, so the ideal solution would be government run with public funding. Wouldn't that be nice?

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Isaac Ji Kuo 1d ago

@alan I mean ... it's pretty common for governments to get involved in projects to try and revitalize a shopping mall, or down town shopping district. There's a public interest in fostering small businesses there.

Is there not a public interest in fostering small businesses in "online" store fronts, also?

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Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 1d ago

@isaackuo We had a big push for that here, but of course the solution was grants to private sector web developers, and the end result of that was either a bunch of poorly maintained WP sites, or people who got set up on Shopify. Most of those shut down when offline shopping came back. Rah, rah "digital mainstreet" LOL

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Isaac Ji Kuo 1d ago

@alan Yeah, it's not so easy to accomplish successfully. If you're going to do this, you've got to accept that there will be failures on the way to getting it right.