Interview with

Design Federation speaks to Jonathan Davis about shopp, his new e-commerce plugin for wordpress.

So Jon, How long have you been coding, and how did you get into it? (or why)
I’ve been programming for about 14 years, since early high school days. I had a friend that had programmed a game with joystick controls that blew me away (this was back in the Commodore 64 days), and I was hooked from then on. I went on to work as a server admin for a local ISP that rapidly pushed me into web design and development work. I got a tremendous amount of skill and experience from my 7 years there. Eventually they made the transition to a full web development studio, but it only lasted for about a year before shutting down for good.

I went freelance and have been doing consulting for website design and programming since 2003 as my day job at Ingenesis Limited.

One would assume as a coder you use a PC, but the word is you use a sexy mac? Is that true and are you secretly a designer in coders body?
Yes and yes. I have a MacBook Pro and was an artist before becoming a programmer. I was doing traditional art (drawing, painting, sculpture) at the time. The web medium really grabbed me since I could apply both worlds of design and programming. Programming, really, is another form of designing since at it’s core designing is solving problems. Graphic design is about solving problems of space, and color and psychology. Programming is solving problems of engineering, data and human-computer interfacing.

Why Shopp, what is it, and why for wordpress not a standalone shopping cart?
Shopp was born out of necessity. I had a client using WordPress with a need for e-commerce, and the existing solutions weren’t cutting it. The standalone solutions were overkill and the solutions in WordPress at the time just couldn’t do the job. I did the core of Shopp in about a month and had it up and running and selling products. Getting it ready for public use, however, was a different matter altogether.

What makes Shopp different from the other wordpress shopping carts already out there?
Shopp has been designed, not hacked together. Applying both my design and development experience, I was able to architect a robust engine for deploying custom stores. It tacks onto the mature infrastructure provided by WordPress and truly extends it with full e-commerce capabilities.

I’ve been very meticulous in trying to create elegant solutions in every aspect of the system, from the database structure for efficiency to the administrative UI for managing the shop. On one side of the spectrum Shopp has provided the opportunity to experiment with some really unique UI approaches that make some rather difficult problems very easy for most anyone to manage, such as dealing with product variations, product downloads and accurate custom shipping rates. On the other side, it’s been fun developing a kind of sub-language of template tags that give developers total access to the store’s data and total control over the shopping experience.

How has the development process gone? Is it as smooth as you hoped or has it been long and arduous?
I won’t lie, it’s not been easy, but it has been fun. I have to give respects to those that have tried to tackle this set of problems before. It’s not a challenge for the faint of heart. And it’s easy to mess it up, which is where I think people run into frustration with other solutions. Now I just can’t wait to see what people can do with Shopp.

Why do you think so many people use wordpress and how difficult is it to create a plug-in for it?
WordPress follows the same basic idea that I’ve been following as a design/engineering principle while developing Shopp: easy but flexible. WordPress has a lot of “out-of-the-box” features that are easily accessible even to novices, while having a rich architecture for developers to extend and enhance through themes and plugins.

Creating a plugin for WordPress is dead simple. Creating a plugin for WordPress that other people will use”… that’s always harder. The bigger the audience, the harder it is.

Wordpress 2.7 – Heaven sent or another pain?
I think it’ll be great in the long run. There are some changes that I’m not a great fan of, but a lot of the new interface approach is just what WordPress has needed. That said, any major transition is painful and I’m sure that moving to WordPress 2.7 will have it’s share. Still, it will be worth it in the end.

And finally, when is Shopp going to be released?
I’m putting the final polish on it now, so it looks like Shopp will be ready by mid- to late- December 2008.

Related Links

http://shopplugin.net/
http://ingenesis.net/

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Tags: e-commerce, ecommerce, jon davis, Jonathan Davis, shopp, shopp plugin, shopping cart, wordpress, wordpress e-commerce, WordPress Shopping Carts