Satyadarshin

Emma’s Emporium is a catalogue website for a wholesale business that sources ethical, practical, beautiful, and unusual fashion, accessories, and home interiors.

WordPress has many fine qualities, not least that it’s highly intuitive and relatively easy to hand on to a client to self-administrate. It’s sufficiently extensible and adaptable that it can be developed to serve a broad spectrum of needs. But there comes a point when one is trying too hard to bend it too ones will, where its data model doesn’t really fit a client’s, and where a custom build is the way forward.

Emma’s Emporium homepage

Taking on the last iteration of the Emma’s Emporium website, the agreed outcome was that it would be handed over to the client to self-administrate. In the end that’s not what happened; Emma’s business flourished and delegating Web admin back to me was more efficient. My strategy for combination of plugins, however, wasn’t employed with me as end user in mind; in trying to avoid raw data and code for soemone else, I created what was — from my point of view at least — a labour intensive update cycle.

So, when Emma came to need an overall upgrade to the site, I considered trying to persuade WordPress into taking on Emma’s stock data as she lists it. A custom content type would have been the way to go, but in actual fact it begged the question: why use WordPress at all? Why do data entry on every item on Emma’s stock list, twice a year, when with only a small amount of understanding between us, a flat data file would make our lives easier (and for the client, cheaper).

Thus, the stock data I’m supplied with in January and September is (with a judicious of find and replace work) converted into a JSON data file and the website unfolds from that perspective.

In order to ensure the site is responsive to the device it is viewed in, I again applied the Zurb Foundation front-end framework on top of my own PHP page-factory. The development here is that to reduce repetition of HTML, content data is passed to a PHP function that builds and outputs the required rows and columns.

Stock item page