Arch Server Progress

[Madchatthew]

So I have to come on here and celebrate now! So I was ignoring the Dovecot upgrade in Pacman and decided that it was time to upgrade Dovecot. The only problem with that, is they revamped the whole thing and there are major breaking changes. I had version 2.3 and now am running version 2.4.

I have spent over 18 hours total getting all the config files setup properly and running. During this though I found that I had a couple of things setup the way I shouldn’t have and was able to modify them to be better. Now that I have the new Dovecot version setup, I can now look into getting some extra features to work with it, like better spam protection and quota amounts and some other things.

I am very happy and pleased with the result. I can email my gmail account and my wife’s gmail account and pretty much get the emails instantaneously on both sides. Now I can setup my website to be able to send mail when a purchase is made and that sort of thing.

I am stoked!

By the way, check out my webpage so far and let me know what you think. It is a wordpress website and I think I am going with SureCart for the store. I know the popular one to go with is WooCommerce, but most of the plugins that I need cost a lot of money to use. With SureCart I can do pretty much everything with it the way it is. I have to finagle a couple of things, but better than paying hundreds of dollars to use woocommerce the way I want. At least for now.

If anyone has any other recommendations that are free and open source ecommerce solutions let me know. I will check them out. So the website is https://graceunboundbindery.com

[phenomlab]

@Madchatthew Hey Chad. The website looks fantastic - so well laid out and a breeze to navigate. Out of curiosity, why did you choose to use a Gmail account to send mail from rather than the domain itself? In addition, one theme (which I use over at https://phenomlab.com) that I know for sure has WooCommerce built in (it is in fact a bundled plugin) is Impreza

https://themeforest.net/item/impreza-retina-responsive-wordpress-theme/6434280

The theme itself is $59.

[Madchatthew]

@phenomlab I just got the email server up and running and fuctioning properly this morning. I have been working on getting the other two sites working with email so I just haven’t been to my site yet to update the email. I was just using gmail as a temporary one. I also set that one up because the email server wasn’t running properly.

I will have to check this theme out. It would be nice to have the store function the way I want and not have workarounds to it. Make it look more professional then.

Thank you on the review, I really appreciate it!

I forgot to mention as well, that I was able to get the email server updated to use the latest security for passwords, which from my understanding is ARGON2ID. So that is nice as well.

[Madchatthew]

@phenomlab said:

In addition, one theme (which I use over at https://phenomlab.com ) that I know for sure has WooCommerce built in (it is in fact a bundled plugin) is Impreza

Yeah, I love how your website looks and so fast! I am definitely going to check that out. Is that a one time fee or a yearly fee for $59?

[phenomlab]

@Madchatthew One time fee, yes. You can purchase annual support, but I’ve never needed to.

[Madchatthew]

@phenomlab That is awesome! With that bundle, can you have add-ons that people can check that will only show up when they choose a specific product? Can you also have a terms and conditions popup before they check out and if they don’t check it it won’t let them checkout but will let them save their cart? Sorry for all the questions. I looked into some of those things and I would need to purchase a plugin that is over 100 dollars for the addons and the terms and conditions one cost money as well. So if those things are included in that bundle, then that is an amazing price for all of that.

[phenomlab]

@Madchatthew said:

can you have add-ons that people can check that will only show up when they choose a specific product?

I think you can do this in WooCommerce, but not entirely sure to be honest.

@Madchatthew said:

Can you also have a terms and conditions popup before they check out and if they don’t check it it won’t let them checkout but will let them save their cart?

Yes, I think this is a WooCommerce setting.

You could also get creative with some JS to provide the functionality you are looking for.

[Madchatthew]

@phenomlab that is what I was thinking. I will have to do some research and bend it to my will LOL

[Madchatthew]

So I switched back to woocommerce because there was some things that I wanted to change that I couldn’t in surecart. So I disabled that plug in and then I re-enabled the woocommerce plugin and started making my changes. I was able to get it so only the one product is seen. I will be adding more later. I have my add-ons added in as products and cross referenced I think the term was to the main product so when you add the main product to the cart those add-ons show up underneath it and you can click to add them to the cart if you want them. Evan was able to find a terms and agreement that did a pop up and a checkbox so you can check that you agree and it’s required before you can purchase anything. And then I found a deposit plugin because I require 50% upfront before they send their Bible to me and then the rest after I finish it and I can manually send out an invoice after that. So I got all of that working did some layout stuff with the cart and the checkout page. I also found a plug in so if you choose the add-on which is a bundle for laser engraving on the spine and the front cover with your name you have to go into the product and there’s a text box to enter your name exactly how you want it spelled on the Bible cover. The alternative to the bundle is just getting the laser engraving done on the spine, which I was able to look up some code so if either one of those get put into the cart it’s takes the other one out and then I used AI to help me refine the code so it’ll automatically detect if one or the other is in there and remove one or the other depending on which one you choose and such or if you change your mind.

I haven’t made it live yet. I will be going over it some more this weekend and working through the process and ironing out any last obvious bugs and such. Oh I also got set up to use PayPal to check out which with the PayPal plug-in you can do PayPal obviously, venmo, Apple pay and you can opt to pay with just the regular credit card or debit card or whatever. At some point I may activate the woocommerce check out but I will probably wait until I get a bank account for the business.

So yeah I am thinking next week I will be able to make this live and I can turn off the Google forms that I am using now. I am pretty excited about making this feature active. And it will be nicely automated because I won’t have to manually make quotes anymore, and everything will be right there and they can check out right away and know what they’re rebind is going to cost immediately and it should be more seamless from picking your custom rebind the colors the ribbons your add-ons and you can go to pay you do the 50% non-refundable deposit and it should be a lot more smooth and seamless I’m hoping.

I didn’t get that theme yet that comes with a bunch of woocommerce stuff. I’m working on breaking even at this point and once I do and get some money built up then I will think about it at that point. But this should work for now with what I have and it is all free pretty much except for paying for the domain name and hosting in that kind of thing.

[phenomlab]

@Madchatthew These are all smart moves, and it certainly looks like you’re headed in the right direction. Best of luck and I really hope this venture succeeds. It’s a niche market but has huge potential once word spreads around.

Building out the basic framework also makes sense before you take the plunge and invest heavier, which I myself would only do once the business starts to turn profit.