Project Day: Studio Shop Overhaul

I'm charging through my 2024 side-project plans like randy sailor on shore leave. My latest project completion is the overhaul of the Maitz & Wurts Studio Shop.

The old Studio Shop was running on Zen Cart, THE open source shop software of choice in... 2011. When I originally signed on as webmaster during the pandemic, the Studio Shop was one of the pieces where I knew right away, "If I touch that before I understand it, it'll disintegrate before my eyes." I added a little duct tape in October 2020 -- making the pages actually resize on cell phones and adding catalog pages in front to guide people to the artwork they desired. After that, the pandemic kept going and going and I lost focus on projects for quite a while.

The bulk of the actual rework took place in February 2024. I downloaded and customized the open source platform, OpenCart, held my nose while engaging with the prickly developer community, and got a working demo site together pretty easily. I then used Kotlin to write a repeatable import/export process that grabbed the inventory of art prints (over 200) from the old shop and loaded them into the new shop.

The trickiest part of the project is that the owners are actually artists who care about the visual presentation of their works -- the site is less a commercial store and more of an online version of a studio you might walk through at the Torpedo Factory or other hippie institute. So the out-of-the-box style of OpenCart might be great for selling phones, but doesn't lend itself well to the appreciation of art.

We went live successfully early on Friday morning. Now that I've wrapped this up, I'm thinking about moving my makeover of the URI! Zone up in the queue and tackling that this summer!