#i actually js watched 3rd life

[iveoy]

hello desert duo enjoyers

[hiro--aoki]

hey pookie, wassup? its your sonic obsessed moot with her first ask 🥰

since you just reblogged that one twd thing not that long ago (the 3 positive thoughts, 3 negative thoughts, 1 hc and 1 ship), i thought i should contribute smth to that. im not actually familiar with the show, and frankly too lazy to actually go watch it for myself, so im js gonna give you the most obvious character

(take a guess who it is1!)

CORAALLLL

YAY, there's another ask for Carl, so this is for both.

3 positive thoughts:

1- His love for his family, specifically Judith. The way he made permanent with Judith. He knows that in the world they live in, you won't get those memories, so he made sure people did. And back in season 3, when Michonne and Carl got the family picture for Judith, it shows the bond between him and his best friend and his determination to give Judith the most norma life possible.

2- His willingness to help. Since season 1 he's been known to do chores around whatever place they call home at the time. Each season, he takes on bigger tasks to help around and eventually going on supply runs. In season 7, he even takes it upon himself to stop Negan, even if he wasn't successful, he was still keeping the fire in his heart.

3- Not giving up. After everything, thinking his dad was dead multiple times, losing people, losing his mum, losing his homes, being shot twice. He never gave up. Sure, sometimes he shut down, but he kept going as long as he could.

3 negative thoughts:

1- Early seasons Carl thinking he knows what he's doing. He was pretty annoying in the first few seasons, and that's coming from a Carl worshipper. Just the way he wonders off, expects nothing to happen, and thinks he knows best sometimes. This is shown in the situation with Negan. It's just pretty annoying. I know it's not entirely his fault, Rick and Lori could've kept a better eye on him, but it's partially Carl's fault too.

2- The way Carl deals with losing close loved ones. Now this doesn't happen every time but when it does, like when he lost Lori, but when he does, he goes into a shell and sometimes it causes something to go wrong. Like in season 3, when he kills the Woodbury kid. He becomes hostile and it effects the group.

3- It was pretty hard to think of a 3rd bad thing for Carl, probably because I don't believe he does many bad things (he does, just let me be delusional). But his back-chatting. Oh my lord, if I back-chatted as much as he did, my ass would be whooped. It's funny sometimes, yeah, but others it's annoying. It's something he carries through every season, and not even Rick can stop him. What a menace.

1 head canon:

He looks up to Dary. Fight me. Yeah, of course Rick and Michonne are some of his role models, but I think Daryl's one too. There's a deleted scene from season 2, where Carl asks if Daryl can teach him how to use his crossbow. I think Carl looks up to how Daryl can protect people, and his tracking skills too. He just finds the tracking skills cool.

1 person I ship him with:

Sophia. I just love the bond between Carl and Sophia in (what I've seen of) the comics and the time they have together in the show. I think that if they let Sophia live, her and Carl's relationship would've followed along pretty similarly to the comic one. And they were really cute in season 1.

[upstartpoodle]

Evens for the WIP meme ask? Thank you! ❤️

Hi, thanks for the ask! Since the number of WIPs I have are well into double figures, I’ll probably just choose a bunch of random ones for these out of the ones I’ve got on my computer.

2. Post a line from your WIP without context.

Once they had returned home, he had wanted nothing more than to head up to his room and hide, but his uncle’s iron grip on his upper arm pulling him into the drawing room had thwarted that wish. He hadn’t dared fight against the man. Uncle Cary had made it quite clear upon his arrival back from school that he expected to be obeyed in all matters, and George knew his future was far too uncertain to risk provoking his only remaining family member with displays of defiance. 

4. Describe the setting of your WIP.

Hmm, I think I’ll go for my JS&MN AU for this one, an extract of which I have posted here. So this is basically an AU set in the universe of the novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell--for anyone who might be unfamiliar with it, it’s a book (and a pretty decent TV adaptation) set in a regency England where magic was once frequently practised but has declined after the Raven King, a medieval magician who conquered the north of England with a fairy army, left his kingdom behind to return to Faerie. The fic is set in Poldark’s s1 timeline, so about fifteen/twenty years before the events of JS&MN canon, featuring Dwight, Ross and Francis as magicians, George as a fairy nobleman from a neighbouring Faerie kingdom, and Elizabeth as a magician’s wife whom George ends up taking an interest in.

6. Search for the word “dream” in your WIP. If you find it, paste the line and explain the context.

I haven’t been able to find it in any of the extracts I have on my computer, but I’m sure it’s probably there somewhere in one of my notebooks. Unfortunately the majority of those are in a box over three hundred miles away so I can’t really check through them ha.

8. What is your biggest challenge?

Actually getting anything finished. Honestly, it depends on the individual fic but for a long time it’s been writer’s block. My undergrad dissertation took a lot out of me and I wasn’t really in the mood for writing for a long time afterwards. S5 airing gave me a bit of a kick up the arse writing-wise though, so I’d say my biggest challenge at the moment is trying to figure out where everything goes in my super long post s5 AU where George gets shot by Hanson. At the moment I’ve just got loads and loads of random bits with only a vague idea of what order they go in and how they join up to each other, and it’s getting to be so long I just keep putting off planning it out properly. Also finishing that last chapter of The Cornish Way damn I can’t even remember when I last updated that I feel so guilty about it ha.

10. How would you describe your WIP’s narrative style?

Well, as I’ve already mentioned I have a whooole bunch of WIPs, but I always write in 3rd person (1st person grates on me, both reading and writing, for some reason--I don’t know why). I’ve got several multi-chap fics in the works, some short, some long. Most of my shorter multi-chap fics tend to alternate between Elizabeth’s POV and George’s, but my long post s5 AU will feature the majority of the characters’ POVs at some point, depending on when they’re needed, though since the fic is George-centric, his perspective is the main one. When it comes to my one-shots, they’re usually either from George or Elizabeth’s perspectives, sometimes both if it’s a particularly long one. I tend to lean towards using Elizabeth’s POV for one-shots for some reason, but there’s a fair few from George’s as well, and a couple of angsty ones told entirely from Valentine’s perspective.

12. Which character do you have the least in common with?

Since my post s5 AU includes Merceron, Hanson and Dr Penrose, I’m glad to say that I haven’t the slightest thing in common with any of those three. But if we’re talking about a main character, I’d say probably Ross. The only thing I have in common with him is a tendency to get fed up at parties ha.

14. Have you chosen birthdays for any of your characters? If so, when are they?

Not really--tbh, I’m not sure how many of them, if any, were given birthdays by WG. I tend to headcanon George’s birthday as being in October, but that’s about it.

16. What would your characters be for Hallowe’en?

Well, I’ve got a couple of WIPs set in the modern era which this could work for, but since one of them is a modern witchcraft AU (in which Elizabeth, Caroline, Demelza, Morwenna and Verity live together in Truro as a secret coven of witches, Francis is a melancholy ghost who haunts the building and they’ve never been able to exorcise, and George, their landlord’s nephew, is their baffled neighbour who only puts up with their weird shenanigans because he has a soft spot for Elizabeth), I guess that’s appropriately Hallowe’en-y ha. For that AU, I reckon Elizabeth would probably dress up as something kind of classy, like as an Ancient Greek lady or a medieval queen, something like that. Caroline would dress up as a witch, I reckon, for the sake of irony (Horace, of course, would have a complementary costume :P). Verity, I think, would make a cute angel, and one of those wood nymph/woodland fairy costumes would probably suit Demelza. Morwenna might dress up as a Hogwarts student or something like that, and Francis insists that since he is an actual, literal ghost, there’s no need for him to dress up. George, on the other hand, absolutely does not do Hallowe’en, but they still manage to drag him down from the flat upstairs, put a pair of little Devil horns on him and make him watch scary films with them. Which he hates every minute of. Absolutely. Totally.

18. What’s easier, dialogue or description?

It depends, but I generally find description easier than dialogue. When I have dialogue-heavy scenes to write, I generally write them out in my notebooks basically in script form so I can figure out where the scene is going and once that’s out of the way, I find it much easier to add all the description in around it rather than having to constantly stop to figure out what the characters are meant to be saying to each other.

20. Post a brief excerpt.

So there’s a whole load to choose from, but I’ve decided to go with this one, which is from a ghost Elizabeth AU I’ve been working on ever since the end of s4 and have been really struggling to get on with because there’s so much bloody angst in it ha :--

The days leading up to Christmas dragged slowly on, and with each long hour that passed, George found himself regretting his decision to allow their initial plans for the festivities to go ahead with ever increasing certainty. The Blameys were neither unkind nor insensitive—quite the opposite in fact; their presence seemed to restore some faint but much needed cheer to Geoffrey Charles, and the company of another boy near his own age had restored Valentine to a fraction of his usual liveliness—but he, who had never been a friend to Verity, and was not well acquainted with her husband or stepchildren, felt the constant pressure of their scrutiny, alongside the horrible awareness of his own inadequacy as their host, whenever he found himself in their company. Verity, in particular, had taken to sending him at frequent intervals, whenever she saw him decline a meal, or else stumbled across him staring up at Elizabeth’s portrait hanging above the mantelpiece in the drawing room, what he had come to refer to in his mind as Looks. Verity had always been a kind and well-meaning soul, but there was a distinct pitying quality to those Looks which he had come to both resent and despise. He could have far more easily borne it if she had scorned his conduct. Her pity, however, wounded what little care he could summon for his pride in the wake of Elizabeth’s loss—he had no need to be reminded of the wretched creature he was fast becoming every time he met her gaze.

Finally, after what seemed like an age, the morning of Christmas Eve came. It had snowed once again during the night, and upon seeing the unblemished blanket of white through the window upon waking, Valentine and young master Andrew had rushed outside, accompanied by the Blameys Senior and Junior and Geoffrey Charles, in order to enjoy it. As the young Esther, whom it had not taken George long to discover was somewhat reticent in nature, had elected to break her fast in her room, that, unfortunately, left he and Verity alone together at the dining table, save for little Ursula, who was playing quietly and contentedly with her own feet in her cradle beside his chair. At barely a few weeks old, however, she was not quite an accomplished enough conversationalist to distract Verity from engaging with him. With a barely audible sigh, George reached for a slice of toast despite his lack of appetite in a vague hope of fending off another Look which he was sure was on the verge of rearing its unwelcome head above the horizon.

“I am glad to see that the boys have regained a little of their usual cheer,” she spoke up suddenly, causing George to pause halfway towards taking a bite out of his unwanted toast; a glance her way confirmed that, despite his best efforts, he was being treated to what could only be described as a Look. “It is a terrible thing to lose one’s parent, no matter one’s age, and certainly not a burden one should face so early in life.”

WIP Ask Game

[89xhshb]

All the questions!!!

Oh wow…There we go!

1: The last person you kissed screams they love you, you say…

I LOVE YOU TOO WHY ARE WE SHOUTING?? 

2: Did you get to sleep in today?

Answered :(3: You never know what you got until you lose it?

Somehow true. You never know how much one person means to you until you lose them. 4: Do you have siblings?

Yep gotta a pain in the ass sister. 5: How many kids do you want?

Answered :(6: Who was the last person you held hands with?

Taemin.7: Did you stand on your tippy-toes for your last kiss?

Unless Taemin is up on a chair or a table?? no??

8: Do you think if you died, the last person you kissed would care?

He better be playing Rihanna at my funeral or I will come back to deal with him!9: Last person to talk on the phone?

My mom. 10: Did anyone watch you the last time you kissed someone?

Yeah..his cat?11: When’s your birthday?

September 3. Mark the date. Bring me glam presents. Mwah12: Remember the first time you kissed the last person you kissed?

First is probs when I was like 5? 6? I smooched this girl and thought I was total badass. Last person would be Taemin? Couple of minutes ago? 13: What kind of phone do you have?

Iphone 7 :)14: Are you wearing jeans, shorts, sweatpants, or pajama pants?

Now? Jeans. I usually go by sweatpants when at home and I sleep in my boxers. 15: Are you a different person now than you were 5 years ago?

Definitely. I grew up a lot from who I was 5 years ago. 16: What were you doing at 4 am?

Sleeping with Taemin on a couch probs17: Would you rather write a paper or give a speech?

WRITE THE PAPER. I am not to be trusted with a speech. Unless it’s a stand up comedy one. 18: Are you lying to yourself about something?

Definitely. Do I need to say what is it?? I am confused by this question :(19: Last night you felt…?

Happy and relaxed. 20: What’s something you cannot wait for?

Answered :(21: Ever told your parents you were going somewhere but when somewhere different?

Duh I still tell my mom I go grocery shopping then order pizza lmao22: How many hours of sleep did you get last night?

Like 4?23: Are you a morning or night person?

Morning person 24: What did you get your last bruise from?

probs Hyuna hit me. 25: Do you reply to all of your texts?

I  try to. 26: Your phone is ringing. It’s the person you fell hardest for. What do you do?

Pick up?? What is this question??27: Did your last kiss take place in/on a bed?

No28: Anyone you would like to get things straight with?

CUBE ENT. Ha. Ha. Ha.29: How many months until your birthday?

Two /wiggles brows.30: Favorite thing to eat with peanut butter?

I just hate peanut butter :(31: Did you like this past summer?

This summer?? So far?? Yes??32: What were you doing before you got on the computer?

Eating.33: Your ex is sitting next to you, with their new partner. What do you do?

Congratulate her on the nice catch. Tell him that she snores and likes guys who spoon for her. 34: What is the last thing you said out loud?

Fuck? Damn? Most probably Fuck. 35: Your mood summed into one word?

Amused.

36: Are you doing anything else besides taking this survey?

Working.37: What are your initials?

HS /JS38: Are you a happy person?

Some days.39: Do you still talk to the person you liked 4 months ago?

Not really. 40: Where do you want to live when your older?

New York41: Have you had your birthday this year?

No so all mark the 3rd of September42: What did you do yesterday?

I cleaned my apartment and did some grocery shopping 43: What will you be doing tomorrow?

Sleeping? Hopefully. I also promised Taemin we will go clubbing together and I cannot wait.44: How late did you stay up last night?

Not late since I was tired. 11pm or something?45: Is there anyone you would do anything for?

My mom and my sister.46: Is it hard to make you laugh?

Not if you have a great sense of humour.47: Do you believe ex’s can be just friends?

Duh I cannot be a hypocrite now since one of my exs is my best friend can I??48: Do you think any of your exes will eventually want to be with you again?

I don’t think so. 49: How many people have you had feelings for in the year of 2012?

Whoa…That is like two centuries ago…I would say 1.50: Do you wish your ex was dead?

Not at all. 51: Have you ever dyed your hair?

DUH. 52: Would ever take back someone that cheated?

Ahh man I actually don’t know? Depends. Tending not to because cheating is such an useless thing in my opinion. If you are in a relationship you can fall out of love and you can hit it on with someone else but that’s why break ups were invented. 53: Was New Year’s Even enjoyable?

It was a hell of a party!54: Bet you’re missing someone right now?

I am. 55: How would your parents react if you got a tattoo?

Ask my mom who almost lost her mind when I showed her my revolver tattoo. She liked the birthdays and had no probs with the small triangle but the revolver was too much (as she would say lmao)56: Sleep on your back or stomach?

SIDE.57: If you could move away, no questions asked, where would it be ?

NEW YORK58: What would you change about your life right now?

My career.59: Has anything upset you in the past week?

Work.60: Are you on the phone?

Not just now.61: Today, would you rather go forward a week or back?

I only go forward. 62: Would you take $40,000 or a brand new car?

The moneyy63: Have you ever talked to someone when they were high?

Yes.64: Ever cried while you were on the phone with someone?

Yes.65: Have you ever copied someone elses homework?

YEs66: Are you the type of person who liks to be out or at home?

TOUGH QUESTION. Both?? Depends on the day. 67: Do you automatically check your phone when you wake up?

Yes..68: Have you ever stayed up all night on the phone?

Yes.69: Could you use some sleep right now?

HELL YES.70: Are you going to have a baby by the time you’re 18?

Long past that age lmao.71: Does it bother you when someone hides things from you?

Hmmm depends?? If it’s something major then yes. 72: What’s your favorite color?

Blue. 73: Have you ever slept in the same room with someone you liked?

Duh74: Have you ever been looking for something and it was already in your hand?

My phone. ALL THE TIME.75: Do you get annoyed easily?

Not really?? But when I am in a bad mood I do tend to get really angry at small things.76: If someone liked you, would you want them to tell you?

I guess that is their decision?? I know that I would tell someone if I liked them straight up.77: Do you have a person of the opposite sex that you can tell everything to?

@nvpch78: Does anyone call you babe?

@taemn93 79: How many people of the opposite sex do you fully trust?

besides my mom and my sister, 2.

80: What do you prefer, relationship or one night stand?

I used to be the one night stand guy and the relationship kind of guy and for me relationships just seem more stable. I am also biased since the relationship I have at the moment is the best so far. 81: What color hoodie did you wear last?

Army Green82: Is there someone who meant alot to you at one point, and isn’t around anymore?

my dad. 

[skateofministry]

Julia Roberts’ very rare video of her son sparks concern from some fans

May 05, 2021 – 14:53 BST

Hannah Hargrave Pretty Woman star Julia Roberts had actually some fans worried for her child’s security after her partner, Danny Moder shared a video of him on Instagram

Julia Roberts keeps her individual life out of the spotlight, so when her partner, Danny Moder, published an unbelievable video of their youngest child, fans were pleased. 

But the enjoyment was polluted a little by some social networks fans who were concerned for the teen’s security. 

MORE: Julia Roberts post astounding throwback picture for sincere factor 

In the excellent clip, Julia and Danny’s youngest child, Henry, was skateboarding down an empty roadway on his method to school. 

“Morning commute,” Danny captioned it. 

  Julia’s partner Danny Moder shot their child’s early morning commute to school 

The views were spectacular and lots of fans admired Henry’s abilities too,  however there were plenty asking the exact same concern… “where is his crash helmet?”

Instead of using protective headgear, Henry, 13, had the wind blowing through his hair as he skated down the winding roadway. 

“Wanna see a helmet on that cute noggin. Accidents happen. Be safe!” composed one, while a 2nd asked: “No helmet?” and a 3rd composed: “I would be worrying about what’s coming around the bend! So cool to watch tho!”

MORE: Julia Roberts’ niece Emma Roberts pays her the very best homage as fans respond

RELATED: Julia Roberts shares exceptionally uncommon image with partner Danny Moder as they mark unique anniversary

Julia and Danny keep their kids out of the spotlight 

Henry is the couple’s youngest child and they likewise share 16-year-old twins, Hazel and Phinnaeus. 

Neither Julia, 53, nor Danny, 52, frequently share images or information of their kids on social networks however in 2015 he did publish a selfie his child took.

In the photo, she was pulling a “gnarly” face and used a wide-brimmed hat. Her long blonde locks poked out from underneath it and he captioned it: “The Day Of the Daughter. So lucky this girl is my daughter...and that she takes these awesome selfies on my phone. Staying gnarly.”

MORE: Julia Roberts has finest response as niece Emma Roberts exposes gender of her child

Julia and Danny’s child Hazel too selfie’s with her papa’s phone 

He likewise published a sweet picture of the whole household together and paid a touching homage to his spouse when he composed: “That pretty mama in the middle. We love you so much.”

Julia and Danny have actually been wed considering that 2002 and will sound in their 19th wedding event anniversary on 4 July 2021. 

Read more HELLO! United States stories here

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from Skate World. Skateboard News, skateboard shop https://ift.tt/3b87OLE

[northofthemonth]

I legit used to work with some of the funniest people. Behold.

[imthepunchlord]

Me Reatching ML: Guitar Villain

Ooooh, I like that they have the detail that Jagged’s necklace is bouncing on him as he headbangs. I don’t think a lot of cartoons would put that detail in. 

I love that this egotistical dork is still wearing Marinette’s glasses. He adores them so much. 

JS doesn’t stress about not being No. 1 all the time, he knows he has skills. 

Jagged has deep trust in Penny’s judgement. 

He’s so dramatic and expressive I love it. 

I feel Penny deals with fights between JS and Bob a lot, and often has to find ways to make both sides happy. 

Bless Jag, he knows potential when he sees it. 

Marinette taps her cheek when she’s in disbelief. 

Bob you sneaky snake. Actually no, that’s an insults to snakes. How about sneaky mosquito? No one likes mosquitoes. 

Marinette definitely knows Jagged’s style. It’s also here that she declares he’s her favorite singer, despite Pixelator being his first official intro and she didn’t seem that excited about him being there. I’m guessing it’s the events of Pixelator that lead to it, mostly like him helping her with Pixelator, being the only official civilian to step up to help thus far, and the factor that he did a song for Ladybug. If she just liked his music before, those are solid reasons to really admire him and boost him up on her favorite list. 

Tom and Sabine are so awed and proud. Also, where did Marinette get her blue eyes? Because Tom has green eyes, kinda greyish; and Sabine as light grey eyes. And I know her great uncle has black eyes. Though Marinette does for sure have a grandmother, maybe that’s where she got her eye color from? Or maybe someone on Tom’s side of the family has blue eyes? It’s a small detail but so curious? 

...Kinda contradicting lessons here Tikki. Pixelator you push for Marinette to follow what she was asked to do, but here, you’re suggesting Marinette not do what she asked and to wing it, do what she wants, with you not knowing for sure if this is what Jagged wants or not. Tikki got lucky in her assumption that Jagged wanted Marinette’s style, but there’s no way to know for sure. Only large difference I can think of is how much effort Marinette is up to put in these project, with shades she was lazy about it at first, but here she’s into it but unsure of what she was asked. 

And you know, I would not mind an episode where Tikki is in the wrong for once. Ultimately she is always right in her advice and views, and being over 5,000 years old, yeah, she would be right about a lot. But despite this kwamis are still flawed, and they themselves don’t know everything. And Tikki does have flaws, but they’re not too obvious outside her bad habit of popping into view (hers I would say are putting a lot of pressure and expectations on Marinette, also being a bit biased towards LB duties, thinks Marinette should care about them more than her civilian life). So seeing Tikki in the wrong in her direction I think would be interesting. 

I really do love and appreciate that JS is really supportive and pushes for Marinette to dive into her style, to grow into it. He does have flaws with his ego and arrogance, but he has strengths too. It really makes him a solid background character. 

Damn he is strong when mad. Also, is it ok for Fang to eat that? I’m not too sure if that’s ok for a crocodile to eat. 

I am curious and concerned about what would’ve happened if Fang had eaten the akuma. Would he become the akuma? Can akumas die? Well, yeah I suppose. Plagg technically died in Timebreaker. I bet there’s some sort of magic on them that allows a butterfly to travel unbothered by predators or they’re just able to escape them. 

Fang makes wtf face. 

Marinette will hold her chin when she’s pensive. 

Adrien eagerly greets her. Then goes oh god as Chloe hugs him XD 

Adrien knows that Jagged is here at the hotel, he was there when Jagged arrived, yet Chloe acts like this is a surprise. 

Tikki is annoyed with those who talk in 3rd person. Who talked in 3rd person that annoyed you Tikki? Was it Plagg? Did Trixx do that to annoy you? Was it some villain you faced in the past?

Gorilla hums at Marinette. He reached out to her. This is the first time I’ve seen him make a sound at anyone. And he just hangs around outside the car when clearly Adrien’s going to be a while. I wonder if he’s curious about Marinette, possibly due to Adrien talking about her? Probably just overthinking stuff though XD 

HEADBANGING. HEADBANGING EVERYWHERE.

Lmao, I remember the first time my sister and I watched this, when we saw all the headbanging we just broke into a giggly fit. 

HM YOU MISSED A GREAT CHANCE TO PUN. Instead of “face their doom” you could’ve said that “they’ll face the music!” or “their world will be rocked!”

...How does Fang fit through the door? 

I love that even the cars will headbang. And pigeons. Bless this. 

20, Tikki floated into the open again hanging by Marinette’s head. 

THEO. Can upcoming seasons keep the Where’s Theo game? 

XY is such a douche. I want to see Marinette go all savage on him. 

And I wonder how old XY is. I want to say 16-18. 

Yaaaaaaas, dragon riding. 

CHAT’S EARS PERK STRAIGHT UP. So cute.

Oooooch he’s got to have a sore bottom at least to break the guitar. 

“THIS GUYS IS CRAZY!” “Thank you.” lmao

I need more Jagged and Marinette interactions. They give me such life. I want Jagged to be her crazy mentor, not just one ep alone. 

Getting an autograph from rockstar Jagged Stone, lol nothing. Getting an autograph from your classmate Marinette, oh boy that’s nerve wracking. 

[riichardwilson]

Building An E-Commerce Site With October CMS And Shopaholic

About The Author

Leonardo Losoviz is a freelance developer and writer, with an ongoing quest to integrate innovative paradigms (Serverless PHP, server-side components, GraphQL) … More about Leonardo …

The Laravel-powered October CMS enables to extend the functionality of the application through the use of plugins. In this article, we will learn how to create an e-commerce site through one of October’s most popular plugins, Shopaholic.

October CMS is flourishing: With over 9000 stars in its GitHub repo, 2000 forks and 300 contributors, it is becoming a major force in the CMS space. It won the popular vote as the Best Flat-File CMS from 2018, new plugins are published on its marketplace almost daily (covering most of the developer needs), and its network of partners is expanding worldwide. Let’s see what it is all about.

Built in PHP and powered by Laravel (one of the most powerful and developer-friendly PHP frameworks), October CMS is a free open-source Content Management System (CMS). It benefits from Laravel’s clean code and sound architecture to provide a great developer experience, over which it adds simple and flexible CMS functionality to provide a great user experience. This combination makes it possible to launch new projects in a matter of minutes, without having to build the project from scratch. Due to all these features, October can minimize the costs of developing and maintaining websites, making it particularly valuable to businesses and digital agencies.

Yet, in spite of its power, October CMS is very easy to use. Since its inception, October has strived to be “as simple as possible, but not simpler”. For this reason, it is based on one of the simplest stacks for the web: PHP to render HTML, plus CSS and JS assets. In the words of its creators, October’s mission is to prove that “web development is not rocket science”.

In this article, we will do a tour around October CMS: We will first see how to install it, then check some of its coding and usability features in a bit more detail, and finally get our hands dirty implementing an e-commerce website through one of its most popular plugins, Shopaholic.

Recommended YouTube Channel

Are you looking to learn more about e-commerce development? You can do so with the help of live streams that explain the main aspects of the development process based on the Shopaholic platform for October CMS. Watch →

Installing October CMS

Since October CMS runs on PHP, it requires to have a web server running on the computer (if we don’t have one yet, MAMP can provide one for free, allowing to choose between Apache and Nginx, and it works for both Windows and macOS) and a MySQL server to store the database (which can also be provided by MAMP).

The installation through October’s wizard doesn’t take more than a few minutes: We create a new MySQL database, download and unpack the installer files to our target directory for the website (which must be granted writing permission, and which must be set as document root in the web server for the chosen domain, such as localhost), and then invoke the script file from the web browser. From that moment on the wizard takes over, guiding us through the installation process. The wizard will:

Validate if the web server satisfies all the requirements (at least PHP 7.0, and others):

System check (Large preview)

Ask for database and site configuration values, and user credentials:

Configuration (Large preview)

Ask how to set-up the site: From scratch, already installing a specific theme, or using our own existing project (from which our chosen theme and plugins can be automatically installed):

Initial setup (Large preview)

Next, we click on “Install!”, and in a few seconds (depending on our Internet connection speed) the website will be installed and ready to use:

Site installed (Large preview)

In this case, I chose to install it from scratch, under http://localhost. Browsing to this URL on the browser, we can encounter the October starter demo theme:

Browsing the starter demo theme (Large preview)

Navigating to http://localhost/backend (unless we changed this URL during the installation process) we can log into the administration panel:

Browsing the admin panel (Large preview)

Finally, we delete the installer files from the folder. And voilà, in just a few minutes we have a fully functioning site (well, we still need to enhance it with plugins… we will do that in a while).

Alternatively, we can also install October from the command-line interface, by executing:

$ curl -s https://octobercms.com/api/installer | php

This method is faster (it can take as little as 10 seconds to install) because it doesn’t require to input the database configuration. Hence, it is particularly useful for setting-up October CMS as a flat-file system, i.e. a CMS fully set-up through files stored in the local disk, and without a database.

Installing October CMS through the CLI takes no time. (Large preview)

Templating System

October CMS has a robust templating system to implement layouts, re-use chunks of code and enable dynamic functionality. Its most important elements are the following ones:

Pages are the most basic structure for storing content. These are readily available, since they are shipped as part of the core (blog posts, on the other hand, must be installed through a plugin). Pages are based on Twig, which is a modern template engine for PHP (devised by the creators of Symfony), and compiled to plain optimized PHP code, so they execute very fast.

Partials contain reusable chunks of code that can be used all throughout the website, as to avoid duplicating code on the different pages or layouts. They are particularly useful for navigation menus, testimonials, calls to action, and other common elements.

Layouts define the scaffolding, or structure, of the page. They define the <html> and <body> HTML elements, and are useful for creating the frame of the site, including the header, footer and sidebars. The actual content in the body is injected by the page.

Components are the mechanism to extend functionality in October CMS. Any page, partial or layout can have attached any number of components, which are most commonly provided through plugins, and which are fully configurable. In addition to rendering HTML code on the page, components can also provide services, such as form validation, security check-up, control of user permissions, or others.

Configuring a component attached to a page. (Large preview)

These elements are all implemented through files living in the website’s folder in the local hard drive. As such, it is possible to edit them not only through October CMS’ built-in editor, but also from the developer’s preferred text editor (Sublime, VS Code, PHPStorm, etc).

We can edit elements either through the October CMS’ built-in editor or in an external text editor. (Large preview)

Similarly, the October CMS project can be perfectly managed through any version control system, and it can be easily adapted to any existing workflows. For instance, a project can be set-up through continuous integration, deploying it automatically to the server after new code is pushed to the Git repo.

October can be easily managed with Git. (Large preview)

October CMS Marketplace

October CMS has a marketplace for themes (which allow to change the site’s look and feel) and plugins (which allow to extend the site’s functionalities), providing both free and paid offerings. By providing themes which can be used to quickly establish and then configure the design of the site, and plugins each of which implements some required functionality for the site, the marketplace ultimately leads to lower costs for creating our projects and reduced time to launch them.

The marketplace has been getting bigger! Following October’s growing popularity, its marketplace has received a constant stream of new offerings: It currently boasts 915 plugins, comprising most of the functionalities required for our websites (blogging, SEO Company, e-commerce, analytics, email, galleries, maps, security, social, user management, and others), and 150+ themes. Both themes and plugins can be submitted to the marketplace by any independent 3rd party developer, company or agency, and they must adhere to quality guidelines, which ensures that they are performant and secure.

Creating An E-Commerce Site Through Shopaholic

Let’s get our hands dirty and implement a real-life use case: An e-commerce website! For this, we will install Shopaholic, the most popular plugin to add e-commerce functionality to October CMS, and the free theme Bootstrap theme for Shopaholic to quickly bootstrap the site (which will be made to look like this demo site). Shopaholic is ideal for our needs because it provides a comprehensive e-commerce solution, which includes an ecosystem of extensions (both free and paid ones) to further enhance it. In addition, we can install the core experience for free and only make a one-time payment for the extensions that we need, which will be cheaper than using cloud solutions which have a recurring fee to use. And finally, because we are the full owners of our own on-premise e-commerce website, we can customize it as much as we need to and we own all the data, which is not possible with cloud solutions.

Because of the October marketplace dependency management system, we need only install the theme (the Shopaholic plugin is added as a dependency). Let’s proceed to install the theme then: Inside the October CMS admin, we click in the “Front-end theme” section in the Settings, and then click on “Find more themes”:

Front-end theme manager. (Large preview)

Then, we search for theme “Bootstrap theme for Shopaholic” and, upon clicking on the result in the dropdown, it will install the theme and all its dependencies. Once installed, we go back to the Front-end theme manager page and click on the Activate button on the new theme:

Activating the new theme. (Large preview)

After installing the theme and plugins, we will notice a new element “Catalog” on the top menu bar. Clicking on it, we can manage the items in our e-commerce catalog, namely products, categories and brands (these are the core elements; other elements, such as coupons, can be added through extensions). Initially, our catalog will be empty:

Catalog comprising products, categories and brands. (Large preview)

Let’s fill it up with some data. We can either create the items one by one or, quite conveniently, import data through CSV and XML files (which allows us to manage a large set of records with Excel or other tools). In our case, since we are creating a demo site for testing purposes, let’s install plugin Fake Data for Shopaholic which provides large sets of mock data and an easy way to import these records to the system. To do this, follow these steps:

Head to Settings => Updates & Plugins in October CMS backend, and install plugin “Fake Data for Shopaholic”.

Head to Dashboard, and click on Manage widgets and then Add widget.

Select widget “Fake data for Shopaholic”, and click on Add.

In the newly added widget, clicking on Generate under section “Generate fake data ” will run the process to import the fake data.

The last step will ask how many times should the insertion be repeated (as to create bulk and be able to test the performance of the site when loading many records) and which data set (clothes or sneakers):

Generating fake data through Laravel’s artisan command. (Large preview)

After running this process, our catalog will look better stocked:

Catalog with some mock data. (Large preview)

The next step is to create some promotions. To do this, we click on Promotions on the top menu, then on the Create button, and fill the required information. Once each promotion is created, we must edit it again to add products to it. After creating a few of them, our promotion list will look like this:

Creating some promotions. (Large preview)

Now that we have some data, we can finish customizing how our front page will look like. For that, we go to section Settings => Front-end theme => Customize and we complete the information for all tabs (Header, Footer, Social, Main slider, Index page). Once this is ready, our e-commerce site will now be ready:

Our e-commerce site is ready! (Large preview)

Clicking on a product, we can see how its page looks like:

Product page. (Large preview)

Auditing The Speed And Reliability Of The E-Commerce Solution

Because we want to sell our products, speed and a good SEO Company are mandatory, so let’s make an audit using Google Chrome’s Lighthouse on the product page to make sure it runs fast and that it will score high with search engines. Running the audit against the live demo site, it returns the following report:

Lighthouse report of the product page. (Large preview)

Equally important is that the site can withstand heavy load, so that if our product becomes successful and attracts plenty of traffic the server doesn’t crash. For this, we can use the Load Impact tool to run a load test. Running the test using 50 virtual users for 12 minutes against the live demo site (which is hosted on DigitalOcean with a droplet configuration of Standard 2CPU/4 GB RAM) produced the following results:

LoadImpact report of a test load using 50 virtual users during 12 minutes. (Large preview)

As can be seen, the website was able to sustain an acceptable response time throughout the load test, giving us the confidence that we can trust the e-commerce plugin when we need it the most: When it’s time to sell the product.

Finally, we can also feel confident of the reliability of the software, since it is covered by unit tests.

Adding Extensions To Shopaholic

So far so good. However, as it can be seen on the screenshots from our website, there is still no way for the visitor to buy a product. Let’s add this functionality by installing the following free extensions for Shopaholic: Orders, to allow to add products to a cart and make orders, and Omnipay, to process the payment. (For the other Shopaholic extensions, if they are not free and authored by LOVATA, you can use coupon “WELCOME” to get a 50% discount the first time you buy them.) To install these extensions, we head to Settings => Updates & Plugins, search for the plugin names, and click on the results to have them installed.

Searching for ‘Shopaholic’ displays its plugins. (Large preview)

Once installed, we will see a new item Orders in the top navigation, where all orders will be stored, and items Payment methods and Shipping types in the Settings page, to configure the payment gateways (card, cash, etc) and how to deliver the product (by post, etc). We configure these and load again the product page. Now it shows an “Add to cart” button, allowing the user to place an order:

Product page with cart enabled. (Large preview)

After adding several items to the cart, we can proceed to the check-out and complete the order:

Completing the order. (Large preview)

Once the user submits the order, the inventory will be automatically taken care of, updating the number of items for each product in stock, and we will receive an email informing us of the new order (if configured to do so). In section Orders on the admin panel, we can find all the information for the order (products sold, buyer information, method of payment and total, and others), and we can complete the transaction.

All the information from the order is here. (Large preview)

The basic work is done: In barely a few hours we managed to have a fully functional e-commerce sith with October CMS and Shopaholic.

Creating Our Own Extension

If none of the several extensions to Shopaholic on the October marketplace provides the functionality needed, we can also create our own extensions.

To do this, if you are comfortable with Object-Oriented Programming and PHP and, more specifically, with Laravel, then you are ready to do it. The documentation explains how to add an extension, step by step. For instance, following this tutorial, with barely a few lines of code we can add a custom field “rating” to our products:

Adding a custom field to the product. (Large preview)

We can then retrieve the new “rating” field from the product and display it in the product template:

Displaying a custom field in the product page. (Large preview)

Extending Shopaholic is not difficult and enables us to fully implement our own e-commerce requirements, and personalize the site to suit our brand.

Conclusion

October CMS is a great candidate for building powerful sites in a very simple manner (showing that “web development is not rocket science”). It delivers the great developer experience granted by Laravel, and its marketplace (which is growing daily) provides a large number of ready-to-use themes and plugins, allowing us to build websites very quickly. One such plugin is Shopaholic, which converts the site into a full-fledged e-commerce platform.

Because of these reasons, building a site with October can be very cost-effective. As a result, it has gained some reputation (by winning the popular vote as best flat-file CMS from 2018) and has increasingly become a tool of choice for businesses and digital agencies crafting sites for their clients.

To find out more from the October community, be welcome to join the October CMS Slack workspace, which is where the creators of themes and plugins published in the marketplace hang out, so you can conveniently chat with them to get their help and advice.

Give October a try (it’s free!), and let us know how it goes.

(ra, yk, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/building-an-e-commerce-site-with-october-cms-and-shopaholic/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/612281391220162560

[scpie]

Building An E-Commerce Site With October CMS And Shopaholic

About The Author

Leonardo Losoviz is a freelance developer and writer, with an ongoing quest to integrate innovative paradigms (Serverless PHP, server-side components, GraphQL) … More about Leonardo …

The Laravel-powered October CMS enables to extend the functionality of the application through the use of plugins. In this article, we will learn how to create an e-commerce site through one of October’s most popular plugins, Shopaholic.

October CMS is flourishing: With over 9000 stars in its GitHub repo, 2000 forks and 300 contributors, it is becoming a major force in the CMS space. It won the popular vote as the Best Flat-File CMS from 2018, new plugins are published on its marketplace almost daily (covering most of the developer needs), and its network of partners is expanding worldwide. Let’s see what it is all about.

Built in PHP and powered by Laravel (one of the most powerful and developer-friendly PHP frameworks), October CMS is a free open-source Content Management System (CMS). It benefits from Laravel’s clean code and sound architecture to provide a great developer experience, over which it adds simple and flexible CMS functionality to provide a great user experience. This combination makes it possible to launch new projects in a matter of minutes, without having to build the project from scratch. Due to all these features, October can minimize the costs of developing and maintaining websites, making it particularly valuable to businesses and digital agencies.

Yet, in spite of its power, October CMS is very easy to use. Since its inception, October has strived to be “as simple as possible, but not simpler”. For this reason, it is based on one of the simplest stacks for the web: PHP to render HTML, plus CSS and JS assets. In the words of its creators, October’s mission is to prove that “web development is not rocket science”.

In this article, we will do a tour around October CMS: We will first see how to install it, then check some of its coding and usability features in a bit more detail, and finally get our hands dirty implementing an e-commerce website through one of its most popular plugins, Shopaholic.

Recommended YouTube Channel

Are you looking to learn more about e-commerce development? You can do so with the help of live streams that explain the main aspects of the development process based on the Shopaholic platform for October CMS. Watch →

Installing October CMS

Since October CMS runs on PHP, it requires to have a web server running on the computer (if we don’t have one yet, MAMP can provide one for free, allowing to choose between Apache and Nginx, and it works for both Windows and macOS) and a MySQL server to store the database (which can also be provided by MAMP).

The installation through October’s wizard doesn’t take more than a few minutes: We create a new MySQL database, download and unpack the installer files to our target directory for the website (which must be granted writing permission, and which must be set as document root in the web server for the chosen domain, such as localhost), and then invoke the script file from the web browser. From that moment on the wizard takes over, guiding us through the installation process. The wizard will:

Validate if the web server satisfies all the requirements (at least PHP 7.0, and others):

System check (Large preview)

Ask for database and site configuration values, and user credentials:

Configuration (Large preview)

Ask how to set-up the site: From scratch, already installing a specific theme, or using our own existing project (from which our chosen theme and plugins can be automatically installed):

Initial setup (Large preview)

Next, we click on “Install!”, and in a few seconds (depending on our Internet connection speed) the website will be installed and ready to use:

Site installed (Large preview)

In this case, I chose to install it from scratch, under http://localhost. Browsing to this URL on the browser, we can encounter the October starter demo theme:

Browsing the starter demo theme (Large preview)

Navigating to http://localhost/backend (unless we changed this URL during the installation process) we can log into the administration panel:

Browsing the admin panel (Large preview)

Finally, we delete the installer files from the folder. And voilà, in just a few minutes we have a fully functioning site (well, we still need to enhance it with plugins… we will do that in a while).

Alternatively, we can also install October from the command-line interface, by executing:

$ curl -s https://octobercms.com/api/installer | php

This method is faster (it can take as little as 10 seconds to install) because it doesn’t require to input the database configuration. Hence, it is particularly useful for setting-up October CMS as a flat-file system, i.e. a CMS fully set-up through files stored in the local disk, and without a database.

Installing October CMS through the CLI takes no time. (Large preview)

Templating System

October CMS has a robust templating system to implement layouts, re-use chunks of code and enable dynamic functionality. Its most important elements are the following ones:

Pages are the most basic structure for storing content. These are readily available, since they are shipped as part of the core (blog posts, on the other hand, must be installed through a plugin). Pages are based on Twig, which is a modern template engine for PHP (devised by the creators of Symfony), and compiled to plain optimized PHP code, so they execute very fast.

Partials contain reusable chunks of code that can be used all throughout the website, as to avoid duplicating code on the different pages or layouts. They are particularly useful for navigation menus, testimonials, calls to action, and other common elements.

Layouts define the scaffolding, or structure, of the page. They define the <html> and <body> HTML elements, and are useful for creating the frame of the site, including the header, footer and sidebars. The actual content in the body is injected by the page.

Components are the mechanism to extend functionality in October CMS. Any page, partial or layout can have attached any number of components, which are most commonly provided through plugins, and which are fully configurable. In addition to rendering HTML code on the page, components can also provide services, such as form validation, security check-up, control of user permissions, or others.

Configuring a component attached to a page. (Large preview)

These elements are all implemented through files living in the website’s folder in the local hard drive. As such, it is possible to edit them not only through October CMS’ built-in editor, but also from the developer’s preferred text editor (Sublime, VS Code, PHPStorm, etc).

We can edit elements either through the October CMS’ built-in editor or in an external text editor. (Large preview)

Similarly, the October CMS project can be perfectly managed through any version control system, and it can be easily adapted to any existing workflows. For instance, a project can be set-up through continuous integration, deploying it automatically to the server after new code is pushed to the Git repo.

October can be easily managed with Git. (Large preview)

October CMS Marketplace

October CMS has a marketplace for themes (which allow to change the site’s look and feel) and plugins (which allow to extend the site’s functionalities), providing both free and paid offerings. By providing themes which can be used to quickly establish and then configure the design of the site, and plugins each of which implements some required functionality for the site, the marketplace ultimately leads to lower costs for creating our projects and reduced time to launch them.

The marketplace has been getting bigger! Following October’s growing popularity, its marketplace has received a constant stream of new offerings: It currently boasts 915 plugins, comprising most of the functionalities required for our websites (blogging, SEO Company, e-commerce, analytics, email, galleries, maps, security, social, user management, and others), and 150+ themes. Both themes and plugins can be submitted to the marketplace by any independent 3rd party developer, company or agency, and they must adhere to quality guidelines, which ensures that they are performant and secure.

Creating An E-Commerce Site Through Shopaholic

Let’s get our hands dirty and implement a real-life use case: An e-commerce website! For this, we will install Shopaholic, the most popular plugin to add e-commerce functionality to October CMS, and the free theme Bootstrap theme for Shopaholic to quickly bootstrap the site (which will be made to look like this demo site). Shopaholic is ideal for our needs because it provides a comprehensive e-commerce solution, which includes an ecosystem of extensions (both free and paid ones) to further enhance it. In addition, we can install the core experience for free and only make a one-time payment for the extensions that we need, which will be cheaper than using cloud solutions which have a recurring fee to use. And finally, because we are the full owners of our own on-premise e-commerce website, we can customize it as much as we need to and we own all the data, which is not possible with cloud solutions.

Because of the October marketplace dependency management system, we need only install the theme (the Shopaholic plugin is added as a dependency). Let’s proceed to install the theme then: Inside the October CMS admin, we click in the “Front-end theme” section in the Settings, and then click on “Find more themes”:

Front-end theme manager. (Large preview)

Then, we search for theme “Bootstrap theme for Shopaholic” and, upon clicking on the result in the dropdown, it will install the theme and all its dependencies. Once installed, we go back to the Front-end theme manager page and click on the Activate button on the new theme:

Activating the new theme. (Large preview)

After installing the theme and plugins, we will notice a new element “Catalog” on the top menu bar. Clicking on it, we can manage the items in our e-commerce catalog, namely products, categories and brands (these are the core elements; other elements, such as coupons, can be added through extensions). Initially, our catalog will be empty:

Catalog comprising products, categories and brands. (Large preview)

Let’s fill it up with some data. We can either create the items one by one or, quite conveniently, import data through CSV and XML files (which allows us to manage a large set of records with Excel or other tools). In our case, since we are creating a demo site for testing purposes, let’s install plugin Fake Data for Shopaholic which provides large sets of mock data and an easy way to import these records to the system. To do this, follow these steps:

Head to Settings => Updates & Plugins in October CMS backend, and install plugin “Fake Data for Shopaholic”.

Head to Dashboard, and click on Manage widgets and then Add widget.

Select widget “Fake data for Shopaholic”, and click on Add.

In the newly added widget, clicking on Generate under section “Generate fake data ” will run the process to import the fake data.

The last step will ask how many times should the insertion be repeated (as to create bulk and be able to test the performance of the site when loading many records) and which data set (clothes or sneakers):

Generating fake data through Laravel’s artisan command. (Large preview)

After running this process, our catalog will look better stocked:

Catalog with some mock data. (Large preview)

The next step is to create some promotions. To do this, we click on Promotions on the top menu, then on the Create button, and fill the required information. Once each promotion is created, we must edit it again to add products to it. After creating a few of them, our promotion list will look like this:

Creating some promotions. (Large preview)

Now that we have some data, we can finish customizing how our front page will look like. For that, we go to section Settings => Front-end theme => Customize and we complete the information for all tabs (Header, Footer, Social, Main slider, Index page). Once this is ready, our e-commerce site will now be ready:

Our e-commerce site is ready! (Large preview)

Clicking on a product, we can see how its page looks like:

Product page. (Large preview)

Auditing The Speed And Reliability Of The E-Commerce Solution

Because we want to sell our products, speed and a good SEO Company are mandatory, so let’s make an audit using Google Chrome’s Lighthouse on the product page to make sure it runs fast and that it will score high with search engines. Running the audit against the live demo site, it returns the following report:

Lighthouse report of the product page. (Large preview)

Equally important is that the site can withstand heavy load, so that if our product becomes successful and attracts plenty of traffic the server doesn’t crash. For this, we can use the Load Impact tool to run a load test. Running the test using 50 virtual users for 12 minutes against the live demo site (which is hosted on DigitalOcean with a droplet configuration of Standard 2CPU/4 GB RAM) produced the following results:

LoadImpact report of a test load using 50 virtual users during 12 minutes. (Large preview)

As can be seen, the website was able to sustain an acceptable response time throughout the load test, giving us the confidence that we can trust the e-commerce plugin when we need it the most: When it’s time to sell the product.

Finally, we can also feel confident of the reliability of the software, since it is covered by unit tests.

Adding Extensions To Shopaholic

So far so good. However, as it can be seen on the screenshots from our website, there is still no way for the visitor to buy a product. Let’s add this functionality by installing the following free extensions for Shopaholic: Orders, to allow to add products to a cart and make orders, and Omnipay, to process the payment. (For the other Shopaholic extensions, if they are not free and authored by LOVATA, you can use coupon “WELCOME” to get a 50% discount the first time you buy them.) To install these extensions, we head to Settings => Updates & Plugins, search for the plugin names, and click on the results to have them installed.

Searching for ‘Shopaholic’ displays its plugins. (Large preview)

Once installed, we will see a new item Orders in the top navigation, where all orders will be stored, and items Payment methods and Shipping types in the Settings page, to configure the payment gateways (card, cash, etc) and how to deliver the product (by post, etc). We configure these and load again the product page. Now it shows an “Add to cart” button, allowing the user to place an order:

Product page with cart enabled. (Large preview)

After adding several items to the cart, we can proceed to the check-out and complete the order:

Completing the order. (Large preview)

Once the user submits the order, the inventory will be automatically taken care of, updating the number of items for each product in stock, and we will receive an email informing us of the new order (if configured to do so). In section Orders on the admin panel, we can find all the information for the order (products sold, buyer information, method of payment and total, and others), and we can complete the transaction.

All the information from the order is here. (Large preview)

The basic work is done: In barely a few hours we managed to have a fully functional e-commerce sith with October CMS and Shopaholic.

Creating Our Own Extension

If none of the several extensions to Shopaholic on the October marketplace provides the functionality needed, we can also create our own extensions.

To do this, if you are comfortable with Object-Oriented Programming and PHP and, more specifically, with Laravel, then you are ready to do it. The documentation explains how to add an extension, step by step. For instance, following this tutorial, with barely a few lines of code we can add a custom field “rating” to our products:

Adding a custom field to the product. (Large preview)

We can then retrieve the new “rating” field from the product and display it in the product template:

Displaying a custom field in the product page. (Large preview)

Extending Shopaholic is not difficult and enables us to fully implement our own e-commerce requirements, and personalize the site to suit our brand.

Conclusion

October CMS is a great candidate for building powerful sites in a very simple manner (showing that “web development is not rocket science”). It delivers the great developer experience granted by Laravel, and its marketplace (which is growing daily) provides a large number of ready-to-use themes and plugins, allowing us to build websites very quickly. One such plugin is Shopaholic, which converts the site into a full-fledged e-commerce platform.

Because of these reasons, building a site with October can be very cost-effective. As a result, it has gained some reputation (by winning the popular vote as best flat-file CMS from 2018) and has increasingly become a tool of choice for businesses and digital agencies crafting sites for their clients.

To find out more from the October community, be welcome to join the October CMS Slack workspace, which is where the creators of themes and plugins published in the marketplace hang out, so you can conveniently chat with them to get their help and advice.

Give October a try (it’s free!), and let us know how it goes.

(ra, yk, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/building-an-e-commerce-site-with-october-cms-and-shopaholic/

[laurelkrugerr]

Building An E-Commerce Site With October CMS And Shopaholic

About The Author

Leonardo Losoviz is a freelance developer and writer, with an ongoing quest to integrate innovative paradigms (Serverless PHP, server-side components, GraphQL) … More about Leonardo …

The Laravel-powered October CMS enables to extend the functionality of the application through the use of plugins. In this article, we will learn how to create an e-commerce site through one of October’s most popular plugins, Shopaholic.

October CMS is flourishing: With over 9000 stars in its GitHub repo, 2000 forks and 300 contributors, it is becoming a major force in the CMS space. It won the popular vote as the Best Flat-File CMS from 2018, new plugins are published on its marketplace almost daily (covering most of the developer needs), and its network of partners is expanding worldwide. Let’s see what it is all about.

Built in PHP and powered by Laravel (one of the most powerful and developer-friendly PHP frameworks), October CMS is a free open-source Content Management System (CMS). It benefits from Laravel’s clean code and sound architecture to provide a great developer experience, over which it adds simple and flexible CMS functionality to provide a great user experience. This combination makes it possible to launch new projects in a matter of minutes, without having to build the project from scratch. Due to all these features, October can minimize the costs of developing and maintaining websites, making it particularly valuable to businesses and digital agencies.

Yet, in spite of its power, October CMS is very easy to use. Since its inception, October has strived to be “as simple as possible, but not simpler”. For this reason, it is based on one of the simplest stacks for the web: PHP to render HTML, plus CSS and JS assets. In the words of its creators, October’s mission is to prove that “web development is not rocket science”.

In this article, we will do a tour around October CMS: We will first see how to install it, then check some of its coding and usability features in a bit more detail, and finally get our hands dirty implementing an e-commerce website through one of its most popular plugins, Shopaholic.

Recommended YouTube Channel

Are you looking to learn more about e-commerce development? You can do so with the help of live streams that explain the main aspects of the development process based on the Shopaholic platform for October CMS. Watch →

Installing October CMS

Since October CMS runs on PHP, it requires to have a web server running on the computer (if we don’t have one yet, MAMP can provide one for free, allowing to choose between Apache and Nginx, and it works for both Windows and macOS) and a MySQL server to store the database (which can also be provided by MAMP).

The installation through October’s wizard doesn’t take more than a few minutes: We create a new MySQL database, download and unpack the installer files to our target directory for the website (which must be granted writing permission, and which must be set as document root in the web server for the chosen domain, such as localhost), and then invoke the script file from the web browser. From that moment on the wizard takes over, guiding us through the installation process. The wizard will:

Validate if the web server satisfies all the requirements (at least PHP 7.0, and others):

System check (Large preview)

Ask for database and site configuration values, and user credentials:

Configuration (Large preview)

Ask how to set-up the site: From scratch, already installing a specific theme, or using our own existing project (from which our chosen theme and plugins can be automatically installed):

Initial setup (Large preview)

Next, we click on “Install!”, and in a few seconds (depending on our Internet connection speed) the website will be installed and ready to use:

Site installed (Large preview)

In this case, I chose to install it from scratch, under http://localhost. Browsing to this URL on the browser, we can encounter the October starter demo theme:

Browsing the starter demo theme (Large preview)

Navigating to http://localhost/backend (unless we changed this URL during the installation process) we can log into the administration panel:

Browsing the admin panel (Large preview)

Finally, we delete the installer files from the folder. And voilà, in just a few minutes we have a fully functioning site (well, we still need to enhance it with plugins… we will do that in a while).

Alternatively, we can also install October from the command-line interface, by executing:

$ curl -s https://octobercms.com/api/installer | php

This method is faster (it can take as little as 10 seconds to install) because it doesn’t require to input the database configuration. Hence, it is particularly useful for setting-up October CMS as a flat-file system, i.e. a CMS fully set-up through files stored in the local disk, and without a database.

Installing October CMS through the CLI takes no time. (Large preview)

Templating System

October CMS has a robust templating system to implement layouts, re-use chunks of code and enable dynamic functionality. Its most important elements are the following ones:

Pages are the most basic structure for storing content. These are readily available, since they are shipped as part of the core (blog posts, on the other hand, must be installed through a plugin). Pages are based on Twig, which is a modern template engine for PHP (devised by the creators of Symfony), and compiled to plain optimized PHP code, so they execute very fast.

Partials contain reusable chunks of code that can be used all throughout the website, as to avoid duplicating code on the different pages or layouts. They are particularly useful for navigation menus, testimonials, calls to action, and other common elements.

Layouts define the scaffolding, or structure, of the page. They define the <html> and <body> HTML elements, and are useful for creating the frame of the site, including the header, footer and sidebars. The actual content in the body is injected by the page.

Components are the mechanism to extend functionality in October CMS. Any page, partial or layout can have attached any number of components, which are most commonly provided through plugins, and which are fully configurable. In addition to rendering HTML code on the page, components can also provide services, such as form validation, security check-up, control of user permissions, or others.

Configuring a component attached to a page. (Large preview)

These elements are all implemented through files living in the website’s folder in the local hard drive. As such, it is possible to edit them not only through October CMS’ built-in editor, but also from the developer’s preferred text editor (Sublime, VS Code, PHPStorm, etc).

We can edit elements either through the October CMS’ built-in editor or in an external text editor. (Large preview)

Similarly, the October CMS project can be perfectly managed through any version control system, and it can be easily adapted to any existing workflows. For instance, a project can be set-up through continuous integration, deploying it automatically to the server after new code is pushed to the Git repo.

October can be easily managed with Git. (Large preview)

October CMS Marketplace

October CMS has a marketplace for themes (which allow to change the site’s look and feel) and plugins (which allow to extend the site’s functionalities), providing both free and paid offerings. By providing themes which can be used to quickly establish and then configure the design of the site, and plugins each of which implements some required functionality for the site, the marketplace ultimately leads to lower costs for creating our projects and reduced time to launch them.

The marketplace has been getting bigger! Following October’s growing popularity, its marketplace has received a constant stream of new offerings: It currently boasts 915 plugins, comprising most of the functionalities required for our websites (blogging, SEO Company, e-commerce, analytics, email, galleries, maps, security, social, user management, and others), and 150+ themes. Both themes and plugins can be submitted to the marketplace by any independent 3rd party developer, company or agency, and they must adhere to quality guidelines, which ensures that they are performant and secure.

Creating An E-Commerce Site Through Shopaholic

Let’s get our hands dirty and implement a real-life use case: An e-commerce website! For this, we will install Shopaholic, the most popular plugin to add e-commerce functionality to October CMS, and the free theme Bootstrap theme for Shopaholic to quickly bootstrap the site (which will be made to look like this demo site). Shopaholic is ideal for our needs because it provides a comprehensive e-commerce solution, which includes an ecosystem of extensions (both free and paid ones) to further enhance it. In addition, we can install the core experience for free and only make a one-time payment for the extensions that we need, which will be cheaper than using cloud solutions which have a recurring fee to use. And finally, because we are the full owners of our own on-premise e-commerce website, we can customize it as much as we need to and we own all the data, which is not possible with cloud solutions.

Because of the October marketplace dependency management system, we need only install the theme (the Shopaholic plugin is added as a dependency). Let’s proceed to install the theme then: Inside the October CMS admin, we click in the “Front-end theme” section in the Settings, and then click on “Find more themes”:

Front-end theme manager. (Large preview)

Then, we search for theme “Bootstrap theme for Shopaholic” and, upon clicking on the result in the dropdown, it will install the theme and all its dependencies. Once installed, we go back to the Front-end theme manager page and click on the Activate button on the new theme:

Activating the new theme. (Large preview)

After installing the theme and plugins, we will notice a new element “Catalog” on the top menu bar. Clicking on it, we can manage the items in our e-commerce catalog, namely products, categories and brands (these are the core elements; other elements, such as coupons, can be added through extensions). Initially, our catalog will be empty:

Catalog comprising products, categories and brands. (Large preview)

Let’s fill it up with some data. We can either create the items one by one or, quite conveniently, import data through CSV and XML files (which allows us to manage a large set of records with Excel or other tools). In our case, since we are creating a demo site for testing purposes, let’s install plugin Fake Data for Shopaholic which provides large sets of mock data and an easy way to import these records to the system. To do this, follow these steps:

Head to Settings => Updates & Plugins in October CMS backend, and install plugin “Fake Data for Shopaholic”.

Head to Dashboard, and click on Manage widgets and then Add widget.

Select widget “Fake data for Shopaholic”, and click on Add.

In the newly added widget, clicking on Generate under section “Generate fake data ” will run the process to import the fake data.

The last step will ask how many times should the insertion be repeated (as to create bulk and be able to test the performance of the site when loading many records) and which data set (clothes or sneakers):

Generating fake data through Laravel’s artisan command. (Large preview)

After running this process, our catalog will look better stocked:

Catalog with some mock data. (Large preview)

The next step is to create some promotions. To do this, we click on Promotions on the top menu, then on the Create button, and fill the required information. Once each promotion is created, we must edit it again to add products to it. After creating a few of them, our promotion list will look like this:

Creating some promotions. (Large preview)

Now that we have some data, we can finish customizing how our front page will look like. For that, we go to section Settings => Front-end theme => Customize and we complete the information for all tabs (Header, Footer, Social, Main slider, Index page). Once this is ready, our e-commerce site will now be ready:

Our e-commerce site is ready! (Large preview)

Clicking on a product, we can see how its page looks like:

Product page. (Large preview)

Auditing The Speed And Reliability Of The E-Commerce Solution

Because we want to sell our products, speed and a good SEO Company are mandatory, so let’s make an audit using Google Chrome’s Lighthouse on the product page to make sure it runs fast and that it will score high with search engines. Running the audit against the live demo site, it returns the following report:

Lighthouse report of the product page. (Large preview)

Equally important is that the site can withstand heavy load, so that if our product becomes successful and attracts plenty of traffic the server doesn’t crash. For this, we can use the Load Impact tool to run a load test. Running the test using 50 virtual users for 12 minutes against the live demo site (which is hosted on DigitalOcean with a droplet configuration of Standard 2CPU/4 GB RAM) produced the following results:

LoadImpact report of a test load using 50 virtual users during 12 minutes. (Large preview)

As can be seen, the website was able to sustain an acceptable response time throughout the load test, giving us the confidence that we can trust the e-commerce plugin when we need it the most: When it’s time to sell the product.

Finally, we can also feel confident of the reliability of the software, since it is covered by unit tests.

Adding Extensions To Shopaholic

So far so good. However, as it can be seen on the screenshots from our website, there is still no way for the visitor to buy a product. Let’s add this functionality by installing the following free extensions for Shopaholic: Orders, to allow to add products to a cart and make orders, and Omnipay, to process the payment. (For the other Shopaholic extensions, if they are not free and authored by LOVATA, you can use coupon “WELCOME” to get a 50% discount the first time you buy them.) To install these extensions, we head to Settings => Updates & Plugins, search for the plugin names, and click on the results to have them installed.

Searching for ‘Shopaholic’ displays its plugins. (Large preview)

Once installed, we will see a new item Orders in the top navigation, where all orders will be stored, and items Payment methods and Shipping types in the Settings page, to configure the payment gateways (card, cash, etc) and how to deliver the product (by post, etc). We configure these and load again the product page. Now it shows an “Add to cart” button, allowing the user to place an order:

Product page with cart enabled. (Large preview)

After adding several items to the cart, we can proceed to the check-out and complete the order:

Completing the order. (Large preview)

Once the user submits the order, the inventory will be automatically taken care of, updating the number of items for each product in stock, and we will receive an email informing us of the new order (if configured to do so). In section Orders on the admin panel, we can find all the information for the order (products sold, buyer information, method of payment and total, and others), and we can complete the transaction.

All the information from the order is here. (Large preview)

The basic work is done: In barely a few hours we managed to have a fully functional e-commerce sith with October CMS and Shopaholic.

Creating Our Own Extension

If none of the several extensions to Shopaholic on the October marketplace provides the functionality needed, we can also create our own extensions.

To do this, if you are comfortable with Object-Oriented Programming and PHP and, more specifically, with Laravel, then you are ready to do it. The documentation explains how to add an extension, step by step. For instance, following this tutorial, with barely a few lines of code we can add a custom field “rating” to our products:

Adding a custom field to the product. (Large preview)

We can then retrieve the new “rating” field from the product and display it in the product template:

Displaying a custom field in the product page. (Large preview)

Extending Shopaholic is not difficult and enables us to fully implement our own e-commerce requirements, and personalize the site to suit our brand.

Conclusion

October CMS is a great candidate for building powerful sites in a very simple manner (showing that “web development is not rocket science”). It delivers the great developer experience granted by Laravel, and its marketplace (which is growing daily) provides a large number of ready-to-use themes and plugins, allowing us to build websites very quickly. One such plugin is Shopaholic, which converts the site into a full-fledged e-commerce platform.

Because of these reasons, building a site with October can be very cost-effective. As a result, it has gained some reputation (by winning the popular vote as best flat-file CMS from 2018) and has increasingly become a tool of choice for businesses and digital agencies crafting sites for their clients.

To find out more from the October community, be welcome to join the October CMS Slack workspace, which is where the creators of themes and plugins published in the marketplace hang out, so you can conveniently chat with them to get their help and advice.

Give October a try (it’s free!), and let us know how it goes.

(ra, yk, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/building-an-e-commerce-site-with-october-cms-and-shopaholic/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/03/building-e-commerce-site-with-october.html

[douglassmiith]

Building An E-Commerce Site With October CMS And Shopaholic

About The Author

Leonardo Losoviz is a freelance developer and writer, with an ongoing quest to integrate innovative paradigms (Serverless PHP, server-side components, GraphQL) … More about Leonardo …

The Laravel-powered October CMS enables to extend the functionality of the application through the use of plugins. In this article, we will learn how to create an e-commerce site through one of October’s most popular plugins, Shopaholic.

October CMS is flourishing: With over 9000 stars in its GitHub repo, 2000 forks and 300 contributors, it is becoming a major force in the CMS space. It won the popular vote as the Best Flat-File CMS from 2018, new plugins are published on its marketplace almost daily (covering most of the developer needs), and its network of partners is expanding worldwide. Let’s see what it is all about.

Built in PHP and powered by Laravel (one of the most powerful and developer-friendly PHP frameworks), October CMS is a free open-source Content Management System (CMS). It benefits from Laravel’s clean code and sound architecture to provide a great developer experience, over which it adds simple and flexible CMS functionality to provide a great user experience. This combination makes it possible to launch new projects in a matter of minutes, without having to build the project from scratch. Due to all these features, October can minimize the costs of developing and maintaining websites, making it particularly valuable to businesses and digital agencies.

Yet, in spite of its power, October CMS is very easy to use. Since its inception, October has strived to be “as simple as possible, but not simpler”. For this reason, it is based on one of the simplest stacks for the web: PHP to render HTML, plus CSS and JS assets. In the words of its creators, October’s mission is to prove that “web development is not rocket science”.

In this article, we will do a tour around October CMS: We will first see how to install it, then check some of its coding and usability features in a bit more detail, and finally get our hands dirty implementing an e-commerce website through one of its most popular plugins, Shopaholic.

Recommended YouTube Channel

Are you looking to learn more about e-commerce development? You can do so with the help of live streams that explain the main aspects of the development process based on the Shopaholic platform for October CMS. Watch →

Installing October CMS

Since October CMS runs on PHP, it requires to have a web server running on the computer (if we don’t have one yet, MAMP can provide one for free, allowing to choose between Apache and Nginx, and it works for both Windows and macOS) and a MySQL server to store the database (which can also be provided by MAMP).

The installation through October’s wizard doesn’t take more than a few minutes: We create a new MySQL database, download and unpack the installer files to our target directory for the website (which must be granted writing permission, and which must be set as document root in the web server for the chosen domain, such as localhost), and then invoke the script file from the web browser. From that moment on the wizard takes over, guiding us through the installation process. The wizard will:

Validate if the web server satisfies all the requirements (at least PHP 7.0, and others):

System check (Large preview)

Ask for database and site configuration values, and user credentials:

Configuration (Large preview)

Ask how to set-up the site: From scratch, already installing a specific theme, or using our own existing project (from which our chosen theme and plugins can be automatically installed):

Initial setup (Large preview)

Next, we click on “Install!”, and in a few seconds (depending on our Internet connection speed) the website will be installed and ready to use:

Site installed (Large preview)

In this case, I chose to install it from scratch, under http://localhost. Browsing to this URL on the browser, we can encounter the October starter demo theme:

Browsing the starter demo theme (Large preview)

Navigating to http://localhost/backend (unless we changed this URL during the installation process) we can log into the administration panel:

Browsing the admin panel (Large preview)

Finally, we delete the installer files from the folder. And voilà, in just a few minutes we have a fully functioning site (well, we still need to enhance it with plugins… we will do that in a while).

Alternatively, we can also install October from the command-line interface, by executing:

$ curl -s https://octobercms.com/api/installer | php

This method is faster (it can take as little as 10 seconds to install) because it doesn’t require to input the database configuration. Hence, it is particularly useful for setting-up October CMS as a flat-file system, i.e. a CMS fully set-up through files stored in the local disk, and without a database.

Installing October CMS through the CLI takes no time. (Large preview)

Templating System

October CMS has a robust templating system to implement layouts, re-use chunks of code and enable dynamic functionality. Its most important elements are the following ones:

Pages are the most basic structure for storing content. These are readily available, since they are shipped as part of the core (blog posts, on the other hand, must be installed through a plugin). Pages are based on Twig, which is a modern template engine for PHP (devised by the creators of Symfony), and compiled to plain optimized PHP code, so they execute very fast.

Partials contain reusable chunks of code that can be used all throughout the website, as to avoid duplicating code on the different pages or layouts. They are particularly useful for navigation menus, testimonials, calls to action, and other common elements.

Layouts define the scaffolding, or structure, of the page. They define the <html> and <body> HTML elements, and are useful for creating the frame of the site, including the header, footer and sidebars. The actual content in the body is injected by the page.

Components are the mechanism to extend functionality in October CMS. Any page, partial or layout can have attached any number of components, which are most commonly provided through plugins, and which are fully configurable. In addition to rendering HTML code on the page, components can also provide services, such as form validation, security check-up, control of user permissions, or others.

Configuring a component attached to a page. (Large preview)

These elements are all implemented through files living in the website’s folder in the local hard drive. As such, it is possible to edit them not only through October CMS’ built-in editor, but also from the developer’s preferred text editor (Sublime, VS Code, PHPStorm, etc).

We can edit elements either through the October CMS’ built-in editor or in an external text editor. (Large preview)

Similarly, the October CMS project can be perfectly managed through any version control system, and it can be easily adapted to any existing workflows. For instance, a project can be set-up through continuous integration, deploying it automatically to the server after new code is pushed to the Git repo.

October can be easily managed with Git. (Large preview)

October CMS Marketplace

October CMS has a marketplace for themes (which allow to change the site’s look and feel) and plugins (which allow to extend the site’s functionalities), providing both free and paid offerings. By providing themes which can be used to quickly establish and then configure the design of the site, and plugins each of which implements some required functionality for the site, the marketplace ultimately leads to lower costs for creating our projects and reduced time to launch them.

The marketplace has been getting bigger! Following October’s growing popularity, its marketplace has received a constant stream of new offerings: It currently boasts 915 plugins, comprising most of the functionalities required for our websites (blogging, SEO Company, e-commerce, analytics, email, galleries, maps, security, social, user management, and others), and 150+ themes. Both themes and plugins can be submitted to the marketplace by any independent 3rd party developer, company or agency, and they must adhere to quality guidelines, which ensures that they are performant and secure.

Creating An E-Commerce Site Through Shopaholic

Let’s get our hands dirty and implement a real-life use case: An e-commerce website! For this, we will install Shopaholic, the most popular plugin to add e-commerce functionality to October CMS, and the free theme Bootstrap theme for Shopaholic to quickly bootstrap the site (which will be made to look like this demo site). Shopaholic is ideal for our needs because it provides a comprehensive e-commerce solution, which includes an ecosystem of extensions (both free and paid ones) to further enhance it. In addition, we can install the core experience for free and only make a one-time payment for the extensions that we need, which will be cheaper than using cloud solutions which have a recurring fee to use. And finally, because we are the full owners of our own on-premise e-commerce website, we can customize it as much as we need to and we own all the data, which is not possible with cloud solutions.

Because of the October marketplace dependency management system, we need only install the theme (the Shopaholic plugin is added as a dependency). Let’s proceed to install the theme then: Inside the October CMS admin, we click in the “Front-end theme” section in the Settings, and then click on “Find more themes”:

Front-end theme manager. (Large preview)

Then, we search for theme “Bootstrap theme for Shopaholic” and, upon clicking on the result in the dropdown, it will install the theme and all its dependencies. Once installed, we go back to the Front-end theme manager page and click on the Activate button on the new theme:

Activating the new theme. (Large preview)

After installing the theme and plugins, we will notice a new element “Catalog” on the top menu bar. Clicking on it, we can manage the items in our e-commerce catalog, namely products, categories and brands (these are the core elements; other elements, such as coupons, can be added through extensions). Initially, our catalog will be empty:

Catalog comprising products, categories and brands. (Large preview)

Let’s fill it up with some data. We can either create the items one by one or, quite conveniently, import data through CSV and XML files (which allows us to manage a large set of records with Excel or other tools). In our case, since we are creating a demo site for testing purposes, let’s install plugin Fake Data for Shopaholic which provides large sets of mock data and an easy way to import these records to the system. To do this, follow these steps:

Head to Settings => Updates & Plugins in October CMS backend, and install plugin “Fake Data for Shopaholic”.

Head to Dashboard, and click on Manage widgets and then Add widget.

Select widget “Fake data for Shopaholic”, and click on Add.

In the newly added widget, clicking on Generate under section “Generate fake data ” will run the process to import the fake data.

The last step will ask how many times should the insertion be repeated (as to create bulk and be able to test the performance of the site when loading many records) and which data set (clothes or sneakers):

Generating fake data through Laravel’s artisan command. (Large preview)

After running this process, our catalog will look better stocked:

Catalog with some mock data. (Large preview)

The next step is to create some promotions. To do this, we click on Promotions on the top menu, then on the Create button, and fill the required information. Once each promotion is created, we must edit it again to add products to it. After creating a few of them, our promotion list will look like this:

Creating some promotions. (Large preview)

Now that we have some data, we can finish customizing how our front page will look like. For that, we go to section Settings => Front-end theme => Customize and we complete the information for all tabs (Header, Footer, Social, Main slider, Index page). Once this is ready, our e-commerce site will now be ready:

Our e-commerce site is ready! (Large preview)

Clicking on a product, we can see how its page looks like:

Product page. (Large preview)

Auditing The Speed And Reliability Of The E-Commerce Solution

Because we want to sell our products, speed and a good SEO Company are mandatory, so let’s make an audit using Google Chrome’s Lighthouse on the product page to make sure it runs fast and that it will score high with search engines. Running the audit against the live demo site, it returns the following report:

Lighthouse report of the product page. (Large preview)

Equally important is that the site can withstand heavy load, so that if our product becomes successful and attracts plenty of traffic the server doesn’t crash. For this, we can use the Load Impact tool to run a load test. Running the test using 50 virtual users for 12 minutes against the live demo site (which is hosted on DigitalOcean with a droplet configuration of Standard 2CPU/4 GB RAM) produced the following results:

LoadImpact report of a test load using 50 virtual users during 12 minutes. (Large preview)

As can be seen, the website was able to sustain an acceptable response time throughout the load test, giving us the confidence that we can trust the e-commerce plugin when we need it the most: When it’s time to sell the product.

Finally, we can also feel confident of the reliability of the software, since it is covered by unit tests.

Adding Extensions To Shopaholic

So far so good. However, as it can be seen on the screenshots from our website, there is still no way for the visitor to buy a product. Let’s add this functionality by installing the following free extensions for Shopaholic: Orders, to allow to add products to a cart and make orders, and Omnipay, to process the payment. (For the other Shopaholic extensions, if they are not free and authored by LOVATA, you can use coupon “WELCOME” to get a 50% discount the first time you buy them.) To install these extensions, we head to Settings => Updates & Plugins, search for the plugin names, and click on the results to have them installed.

Searching for ‘Shopaholic’ displays its plugins. (Large preview)

Once installed, we will see a new item Orders in the top navigation, where all orders will be stored, and items Payment methods and Shipping types in the Settings page, to configure the payment gateways (card, cash, etc) and how to deliver the product (by post, etc). We configure these and load again the product page. Now it shows an “Add to cart” button, allowing the user to place an order:

Product page with cart enabled. (Large preview)

After adding several items to the cart, we can proceed to the check-out and complete the order:

Completing the order. (Large preview)

Once the user submits the order, the inventory will be automatically taken care of, updating the number of items for each product in stock, and we will receive an email informing us of the new order (if configured to do so). In section Orders on the admin panel, we can find all the information for the order (products sold, buyer information, method of payment and total, and others), and we can complete the transaction.

All the information from the order is here. (Large preview)

The basic work is done: In barely a few hours we managed to have a fully functional e-commerce sith with October CMS and Shopaholic.

Creating Our Own Extension

If none of the several extensions to Shopaholic on the October marketplace provides the functionality needed, we can also create our own extensions.

To do this, if you are comfortable with Object-Oriented Programming and PHP and, more specifically, with Laravel, then you are ready to do it. The documentation explains how to add an extension, step by step. For instance, following this tutorial, with barely a few lines of code we can add a custom field “rating” to our products:

Adding a custom field to the product. (Large preview)

We can then retrieve the new “rating” field from the product and display it in the product template:

Displaying a custom field in the product page. (Large preview)

Extending Shopaholic is not difficult and enables us to fully implement our own e-commerce requirements, and personalize the site to suit our brand.

Conclusion

October CMS is a great candidate for building powerful sites in a very simple manner (showing that “web development is not rocket science”). It delivers the great developer experience granted by Laravel, and its marketplace (which is growing daily) provides a large number of ready-to-use themes and plugins, allowing us to build websites very quickly. One such plugin is Shopaholic, which converts the site into a full-fledged e-commerce platform.

Because of these reasons, building a site with October can be very cost-effective. As a result, it has gained some reputation (by winning the popular vote as best flat-file CMS from 2018) and has increasingly become a tool of choice for businesses and digital agencies crafting sites for their clients.

To find out more from the October community, be welcome to join the October CMS Slack workspace, which is where the creators of themes and plugins published in the marketplace hang out, so you can conveniently chat with them to get their help and advice.

Give October a try (it’s free!), and let us know how it goes.

(ra, yk, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

Via http://www.scpie.org/building-an-e-commerce-site-with-october-cms-and-shopaholic/

source https://scpie.weebly.com/blog/building-an-e-commerce-site-with-october-cms-and-shopaholic

[lewiskdavid90]

82% off #The Complete React Web App Developer Course – $10

Learn React & Redux By Creating 5 Apps

All Levels,  – 29.5 hours,  158 lectures 

Average rating 4.7/5 (4.7 (1,965 ratings) Instead of using a simple lifetime average, Udemy calculates a course’s star rating by considering a number of different factors such as the number of ratings, the age of ratings, and the likelihood of fraudulent ratings.)

Course requirements:

A computer on which you can install software (Windows, MacOS, or Linux) A basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Course description:

I’ve just added new content to the course that covers new React features and ensures all projects work with the latest version of React (v15.3.2). Enjoy!

There is no better time than now to learn React. According to the 2016 Stack Overflow Survey, React is in the top ten for developer salaries and it’s the #1 fastest growing technology. That means more jobs and more opportunities for you.

I’ve designed this course around one goal: Turning you into a professional React developer capable of developing, testing, and deploying real-world production applications.

Learn React by building.

This course is project-based. You’re responsible for writing code in every video as well as completing challenges I’ve designed to help test and reinforce what you’ve learned. This course is about creating, not watching!

You’ll be programming and deploying three React apps:

A weather application A countdown/timer app A todo application with social login and Firebase integration

This course covers more than just React. You’ll learn about the rich ecosystem of 3rd-party tools, such as:

React Redux Webpack Firebase Git/GitHub Heroku Chrome developer tools React and Redux developer tools Karma Mocha Foundation Axios And more!

Why React?

With so many alternative frameworks out there, the question has to be asked. Why React? 

React has a small learning curve and comes with fantastic documentation. React is fast and extensible React comes with a preprocess called JSX that simplifies HTML templates. React has an awesome community of open source developers creating great tools and libraries. It’s used and supported by companies like Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, and more.

Access to fast support and a community of like-minded students.

I offer fast and friendly support. You won’t have to sit around hoping someone will actually reply. I answer every single question that students post in a timely manner.

I can’t wait to see you inside!

– Andrew 

Full details You’ll learn how to develop, test, and deploy React web applications Understand the rich ecosystem of 3rd-party libraries like Redux and Webpack Learn how to setup and automate testing using Karma and Mocha Learn to style applications using the Foundation framework Anyone looking to launch their own React applications, switch careers, or freelance as a React developer

Reviews:

“This is my second time through this tutorial. Some really amazing additions have been made since my first time. Colt just keeps making this better!” (Miguel Jardine)

“VERY thorough and comprehensive! Andrew is very gifted instructor who brings boundless energy and encouragement to each lecture and he’s there for you when you get stuck. Andrew rocks!” (Nick Fiorentini)

“I learned React from scratch with this course. It takes time to complete it, especially if you actually follow along and do all the challenges. But the challenges are a great way to really learn and not just watch and forget. When I say it takes time, this is because the course is really in-depth (over 150 lessons!) and has so much content. The content is structured logically, in each lesson you build up more knowledge based on what you have learned in previous lessons and you will progress from very basic to increasingly complex applications. Andrew is a fantastic teacher. He explains everything really well. I never felt like he was going too slow or too fast. He promptly answers all questions and he keeps updating the course and even adding new content. I finished the course some months ago and now I am back because he added more content. Thank you so much, Andrew! I got this course at a discounted price and almost feel a little bad about it because it has provided so much value to me – I would have gladly paid the full price and more and still think this was a steal for what you get. I have been using the skills learned in this course to work on a successful real-life React application. I can honestly say that this is one of the best if not the best course I have done on Udemy (and I have done a lot). Thanks again to Andrew for his commendable dedication and excellent service!” (Rafael Schwemmer)

  About Instructor:

Andrew Mead

I’m Andrew, a full-stack developer living in beautiful Philadelphia! I launched my first Udemy course in 2014 and had a blast teaching and helping others. Since then, I’ve launched 3 courses with over 21,000 students and over 1,900 5-star reviews. I currently teach Node, Gulp, and React. Before I ever heard about Udemy or thought about teaching, I created a web app development company. I’ve helped companies of all sizes launch production web applications to their customers. I’ve had the honor of working with awesome companies like Siemens, Mixergy, and Parkloco. I have a Computer Science degree from Temple University, and I’ve been programming for just over a decade. I love creating, programming, launching, learning, teaching, and biking. I can’t wait to see you inside one of my courses!

Instructor Other Courses:

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