One of the numerous side projects that’s been keeping me from blogging (alongside working full time and preparing for a round-the-world trip and an international move) made a quiet launch yesterday. You can find it over at shop.georgiamusicstore.com.
The site is a component of a wider online presence for the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, providing e-commerce facilities for their gift shop. It went through numerous iterations as they refined how they wanted to manage stock, and now takes stock updates uploaded from CSV files for easy integration with their other back-office systems. Payments are handled through the excellent Active Merchant which makes the payment side of e-commerce development a breeze. Search come from ferret, and a little reassurance is provided by the wonderful exception_notification.
I also took the table-based HTML of the main site and reworked it as XHTML and CSS. It may have saved time to just work with the existing templates, but after all these years of avoiding tables for everything but tabular content, it hurt too much not to have a validating front page.
There have already been a few changes made as we load more data in and hit it with real requests, and thanks to the flexibility of rails and capistrano it will remain nice and easy to keep revising as we go along.