I know it’s been over a month since I said I was about to resume blogging. Sorry about that. While I thought I’d taken care of all the necessary code changes and was ready to start up the content, a supposedly unrelated project ended up snowballing into even further sweeping changes, so I decided to hold back until getting those wrapped up as well.
This “unrelated project” was the implementation of a brand new, far friendlier eCommerce solution – now located at justin-klein.com/store. I’ve finally dumped the OpenCart-based store I’ve been using to sell my plugin since launching it more than 2 years ago, in favor of newer and greener pastures.
But why would this affect my main website (and ability to blog)? Because in order to tie things more seamlessly together, I converted the entire site to a WordPress Network and built the new store in a subblog – letting them share the same user database. This involved custom scripts to migrate and merge everything together, but will ultimately make my backend management – as well as the customer checkout process – far, far simpler. Unfortunately, getting it all up and running required an unexpected number of fixes (such as painstakingly converting my entire database to UTF-8, changing the database prefix, buying a dedicated IP and setting up an SSL certificate, and so on).
Anyway, if you’re an existing customer your user account and order history have both been migrated over – except for your password, which you can reset here (or just login with Facebook, assuming the email addresses match). Otherwise, please let me know if you have any problems – I’ve gone to great lengths to test and verify that everything should be in order, but the store does have quite a bit of custom code written specifically for this site, so fingers crossed that it all goes well.
…And hopefully now I’m ready to start catching up with writing! 😉