I just wanted to pass along a link to my newly launched ExpressionEngine + FoxyCart + Foxee site, WJGilmore.com. WJGilmore.com serves as the central sales location for my PHP books and other learning packages.

Long story short, late last year I concluded that I needed to migrate away from my custom CMS + e-commerce solution, which became increasingly unwieldy as my customer base and desires for product expansion grew. After a great deal of investigation I settled upon ExpressionEngine + FoxyCart + Foxee, and have been quite pleased with the outcome.

WJGilmore.com is actually a fairly heavily customized solution due to my relatively unique project requirements which involved not only the sale of physical, downloadable, and subscription products, but also combinations of these products. Thanks to ExpressionEngine’s pluggable architecture, I was able to create a series of plugins which helped me determine otherwise nasty ownership issues such as whether an owner of a particular book also had access to a particular video thanks to a packaged product configuration.

Foxee’s customer import option also worked beautifully, and after consulting the forum for advice a few times, I was able to import all of my existing customers literally within minutes.

So thanks to Foxee’s developers and the Foxee forum users, both the product and your assistance have been invaluable.

Jason
Check out my books at WJGilmore.com!

STORE HOME: http://www.abort73.com/gear
CATEGORY PAGE: http://www.abort73.com/shirts
PRODUCT PAGE: http://www.abort73.com/shirts/would_it_bother_us_more_if_they_used_guns_thermal/

I was surprised last fall to get a call from these guys wanting me to work on creating a website and online store for their labels and artists. They had seen the work I had done for Eric Bachman’s Crooked Fingers project, and liked the simplicity of the design and content presentation. Trouble is, they wanted a way to manage not only the content and products for the label, but they wanted to also manage and customize the artist’s “mini-sites” within the context of the same CMS. Hellooooo Expression Engine. Actually hello Expression Engine, Multi-Site Manager, Foxee, and FoxyCart!

By utilizing the power of EE’s MSM, I was able to allow the label group to manage all content, product info, and artist sites within the context of a single content management system. And the integrations with Foxee and FoxyCart were seamless and very quick to deploy. The label group also takes advantage of Campaign Monitor for their email marketing.

Majorly complex project tamed, by some majorly powerful (and easy to use) tools.

Shout out to Mark Pernice at Matic for the design.

P.S. A third label site for Instinct Records will be coming online before the end of May 2010. Wow.

Roles:
Creative Direction, Project Management, Design, Development

Technology Used:
Expression Engine, Multi-Site Manager, Foxee, FoxyCart, Campaign Monitor, PHP, XHTML, CSS

Nothing too special in this site, just great design, with a great CMS, and a great e-commerce processor under the hood.

Details:
VerVita serves to educate and equip a community whose desire to enhance personal wellness and achieve their life’s greatest dream can be achieved through specifically designed products naturally occurring in nature.

Developed using the combination of FoxEE and Foxycart to deliver a smooth, seamless shopping experience for the end user, combined with brilliant design and CMS functionality from ExpressionEngine for the site administration.

Technical Notes:
Addons: FF Matrix, LG Replace, LG Live Look, LG TinyMCE, Playa2
Complete Content design and control from the combination of FF Matrix for images and files
Complex relational look ups for products of the month, newsletters and testimonials

There’s a lot going on on this site. Including the implementation of FoxEE and FoxyCart. Though much of the implementation deviates from the documented usage to achieve the required layouts the client requested.

Additionally,  this project does away with the Modal Window associated with FoxyCart for a number of reasons but primary is the fact that the Modal Window’s fixed height does not work well with multiple items selected to the users cart (adds an internal scrollbar).

All in all though, this solution seems to be working well for my client.

http://www.cityswagusa.com

Any kind of feedback is greatly appreciated. Constructive criticism is welcome.

FoxEE made it so much easier to implement the cart. A definite must-have extension.

cart url: http://peaceloveandmomminess.com/shop_categories/

This was built using EE, with cart duties handled by FoxEE and Foxycart. Some of the font stuff is sIFR, there’s a little jQuery thrown in for good measure, and plenty of extensions & plugins abound. Anyway, my favorite part is the fact that my client really enjoys the site, enjoys working with the backend… the fact that we could offer her so much of what she wanted without having to sacrifice based on the system.

Oh, and note the commenting system that features “flair” buttons. ‘S kinda fun.

One note about FoxEE, on the negative side, and that is we had to hack the core to activate the addtocart_begin function which is in the code, but commented out. We had to add that back in because we needed to do some fancy stuff to the way the products behaved: detail rollovers, clickable color options, graphics for options rather than drop down boxes. The problem we had is that there wasn’t enough detail in the options themselves to target them easily using jQuery. We ended up outputting our own input code for each product:

so that we could split off the last chunk, the entry_id, and then manipulate other elements on the page, and then manipulated other elements of the HTML as well. If FoxEE would output the unique sku of each product as something like id=“prodsku_123” then it’d be pretty easy to manipulate everything via JS, rather than having to make our own hacks. Or make the addtocart_begin function available for reals.

That nitpick aside, our client has enjoyed working with it just fine, and after I learned that the addtocart_begin function was available in the core already (just commented out) my life got a lot easier as well. I’ll use it again. There are some other things I’d like to see from FoxEE to make it easier for our clients to make changes, but for now I’ll just be happy with what I have.

just online yesterday.
only for swiss people, till now!

cheers
stefan