We recently completed a website project on behalf of our partners at Foxhollow Farm to combine their separate websites for delivery and pickup orders into one. You can read more about our UX solutions and results of the project in our case study. In this journal article however, we wanted to outline some of the development solutions that made this project possible.

The biggest issue when merging two systems is that you have data in different formats in different places, even if it is being used for the same purpose. In Foxhollow Farm's case, we had product data in WooCommerce and Shopify, with additional subscription data in Shopify. VIA Studio intended to merge everything into WooCommerce; this meant we had to move all the subscriptions from Shopify. In addition, one site used Stripe, and the other one used Authorize.net. 

, we were able to set up subscriptions in WooCommerce. The plugin also offers an 

, which can import a formatted CSV with subscriber data. On the Shopify side, Foxhollow Farm was using a tool called ReCharge to manage the subscriptions. 

 offers an active subscriber export, which we used to create a CSV of all the existing data. From there, we did some data massaging to only include the fields we need to import into the Subscriptions plugin. In order to be able to bill customers again, we had to pull the client ID and payment ID from Stripe as well.

Once that data was in the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin, the subscriptions ran seamlessly, and customers continued to have their subscriptions fulfilled with no interruption on their side. Existing subscriptions use the existing Stripe token to authorize payments while new subscriptions use Authorize.net, to match the rest of the site.

Now that both pickup and delivery products are served through one website, the normal checkout flow provided out of the box by WooCommerce is inadequate. For instance, pickup products do not have shipping, however, they have pickup times and need to be noted multiple times during the checkout flow so the consumer knows this. Another example would be that some delivery products are only available for certain zip codes and there are also instances where both types of products would be in a user's shopping cart.

With this in mind, the design team came up with single page, multi-step checkout experience that informs the user of the shipping information (pickup times, actual shipment information, etc..) and makes everything clear and concise.

To do this, development-wise we created two different portions - the slideout cart that uses ajax to update cart amounts and products and the actual checkout template. The checkout page is able to include all the required information at page load in tabs, with validation in between each tab step. The backend contains logic for the different use cases of product types.

 to help manage orders. With it, adding new order statuses became something the Foxhollow Farm team could do, and it even has the ability to customize emails sent when the status is changed to the new status. We also customized the existing emails to better reflect the different product types and their delivery or pickup methods.

While these solutions all primarily impacted the website's backend and eCommerce and payment platforms, it is what made the task of combining two website experiences into one, consistent experience possible!

Want to learn more about this project? Check out the UX case study!

Backend Development

Websites

Custom Dev

Development Solutions for Foxhollow.com

As a front-end developer in 2020, it is time that I fulfill the FEDeral mandate that I publish words regarding the JAMStack. If you follow too many developers on Twitter, it’s likely you’ve heard about the Next Big Thing in web development, but I’d like to put this trend (fad? movement?) into context to better understand what’s truly new about this approach and whether it’s worth using.

What even is a stack? You may have heard the term “full-stack developer” and know it refers to someone who does both frontend and backend work, but what is the actual stack? A stack — in the web development world — describes the combination of tools being used to host, serve and render a web project. Traditionally it has four components: an operating system, a server, a database and a programming or scripting language.

Let’s look at a couple notable stacks in recent history.

The LAMP Stack comprises Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. This is 

 stack of the early 2000s, and due to its ubiquity it will be around for many years to come. Notable LAMP sites — include Facebook (which has since migrated away), Wikipedia (technically using MariaDB rather than MysQL, for the record) and Yahoo (remember Yahoo?). Most importantly, though, is Wordpress, which powers something like thirty percent of the web and is almost certainly the biggest reason for the average person to build a LAMP stack site in 2020. Because of its history and popularity, though, there is a huge community of developers with LAMP knowledge, and it’s very easy to find affordable hosting from almost any provider.

As you may have noticed from the lack of an acronym, this is not a stack per se, but it is a highly opinionated web framework that became a popular alternative to the LAMP stack architecture in the mid-to-late 2000s. It is database agnostic, so you could still use a MySQL server, but Rails itself generates models, controllers, tests, database migrations, etc. and famously enforces the Rails method of application building. Github is a notable example of a Rails site. To this day, if a company is building a monolithic server-based website, it will likely choose either Rails or a framework it’s inspired, like Laravel for PHP.

Arguably the JAMstack of 2014, the MEAN Stack comprises MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, and Node.js. As is apparent from all those suffixes, this stack is JavaScript all the way down. The advent of Node.js, a Javascript environment that allows the language to be used anywhere, not just the browser, opened the door for a new era of web development where the full stack could be written in one language. Innovations were being made on the backend with NoSQL databases like Mongo, and the Javascript framework wars were beginning with Google’s Angular and Facebook’s React. (At the time, Angular had the edge. Since then, the frontend community has largely unified around React as the framework of choice, which contributed to the decline in popularity of the MEAN Stack.)

This is very much not a stack but feels worth mentioning as it’s a trend that feels transitional between the MEAN Stack and the JAMstack. With the popularity of React and its tool Create React App, as well as libraries like React Router, a client-side routing tool, many developers began creating sites that were completely client-side: a single index.html with a React application container that simulates a multi-page application without any server-calls or page changes. But while this is useful for interactive web applications like drawing tools, for more traditional websites it meant abandoning server benefits like SEO and resulted in extremely large Javascript bundle sizes.

From a stack perspective, the OS has been replaced by a CDN, the web server has been replaced by serverless functions, the database is optional, and JavaScript is the only required language. Like Ruby on Rails, this approach relies one one tool: the static site generator.

A static site generator is a tool that pre-renders web pages from a combination of markup and Javascript and will usually also perform code-splitting and other optimizations on the codebase. By pre-rendering the pages, the files can be served statically from CDNs rather than having to be rendered at runtime by a web server.

There are many tools available, depending on your language of choice. For true versatility, use something like 

 to take any type of markup — Markdown, Liquid, plain old HTML — and generate static pages without the need for a Javascript framework. Similar tools are 

For those who have a Javascript framework of choice, each big framework has its own choices for SSGs. For React, Gatsby is a popular choice for generating static pages from a React application and has an ecosystem of themes and plugins to choose from. NextJS can do the same but is notably more than just an SSG. On a page-by-page basis, it can either generate a static page or server-render it, providing extra options for those who want the speed and simplicity of static pages without sacrificing the benefits of server-rendering for pages that need it.

The core concept behind JAMstack is that almost any functionality you would need from a server has an API available already. Need CRUD for your MySQL database? Use 

 to generate a GraphQL endpoint for it. Authentication? Use 

. CMS? Well, that’s a whole other blog post, but 

. These are usually referred to as "headless" services, as they have been decoupled from the front-end.

For anything else, use Netlify’s serverless functions or NextJS’s API routes to spin up a little endpoint that handles what you need on the fly.

So should you start building all your sites with the JAMstack? As always, It Depends. Let’s take a look at some of the key decision points.

Static sites are extremely fast. Pages. Unfortunately, they can be very slow to build. If a site has thousands of pages, an SSG generally has to generate every single one of those pages every time the site is built. This can take a long time and severely hold up deployments. Fortunately, features like NextJS’s incremental static page regeneration allows for a hybrid approach where some pages can be generated at build time and the rest aren’t generated until they’re requested.

Some may also argue that static page speeds can be replicated by simply putting Cloudflare’s CDN in front of a Wordpress site, for example, but it’s nice that the speed is there out of the box rather than requiring the setup of a CDN or caching solution on top of the site build.

A common complaint about Wordpress is that they are vulnerable to hacking attempts. This is not so much a problem with Wordpress itself as it is with the fact so many websites are built with it. But the reality is that because JAMstack sites don’t have a server, there isn’t really anything to hack into. And because data fetching can be done in serverless functions, you can also avoid exposing API tokens like you might in a fully client-side site.

On the other hand, you have to put a lot of trust in the services you’re relying on, especially for e-commerce, so it’s important to vet all of your APIs and not rely on the lack of a server for solving all of your security problems.

This is arguably one of the largest benefits of the JAMstack. Static site generators generally have great build tools that enable features like fast refresh, code splitting and ready-made development environments. There is generally very little setup required to get a project started, and libraries, APIs and build tools can be added as needed, if needed. Frameworks like NextJS will handle things like Webpack and Babel configurations, routing, and enforcing best practices for front-end development, freeing up developers to Just Write Code. The only risk here is getting greedy and simply writing too much of it! It’s tempting to use every library out there and end up serving way too much Javascript. But when used responsibly, you can painlessly create great front-end experiences.

Monolithic approaches like Wordpress, Ruby on Rails or Laravel are still extremely useful for developers or teams with a need for fully custom backends or simply want to use a tried-and-true approach with endless resources and hosting options. For developers who want to quickly spin up fully custom marketing sites, ecommerce shops and blogs to deliver rich frontend experiences without needing to build custom servers, the JAMstack is an exciting new methodology that provides great experiences for both developers and users.

Frontend Development

PHP, Javascript & React

What's the JAMstack?

User Experience

UX / UI

Ecommerce

Web Design

Foxhollow Farm 

Branding

Photography

Art Direction

Accessibility

Treyton Oak Towers

Websites are the cornerstone of marketing in this day and age. Your website is the place where you have ultimate freedom to express your brand and interact with your audience and customers how you’d like. Using agile, user-focused strategies and design, we build highly accessible, highly useful websites that meet your goals.

Websites

Websites: Case Studies

01

Foxhollow Farm

02

Treyton Oak Towers

Websites: Blog Posts

Development Solutions for Foxhollow.com

What's the JAMstack?