craft cms

Today we take a sneak peek behind Snipcart developer Matt Stein’s curtain. Matt is a developer with a design background, who has recently developed the Snipcart plugin for Craft CMS. Matt talks about his motivation to create Snipcart when there were already two great ecommerce plugin options on the market currently - Commerce Pro and Commerce Lite, and gives us insight into where Snipcart sits between the two, and who should be using it.

Listen as I chat to Matt not just about his professional life as a developer, but how he achieves his work/life balance. We talk about:

Key takeaways:

• Why he chose to settle in Seattle rather than Boston after university.
• How Snipcart differs to Commerce Pro and Commerce Lite.
• Why, even though he’d been developing Snipcart since 2014, he only made it public recently.
• How he determined the cost of the plugin ($179).
• Why he’s a perpetual learner who just loves learning new things (and why his home sewn, manly reading pillow is a solid invention).
• What makes Columbus, Ohio so great.

URLs/resources/social media links:

Twitter: @mattrambles
Snipcart plugin: https://workingconcept.com/plugins/snipcart
Snipcart: https://snipcart.com
The Beer Junction: https://twitter.com/thebeerjunction

Ryan Masuga, the founder and Principal of Masuga Design, has more than a decade of experience growing and running his business. He has learned (sometimes the hard way) what it takes to be profitable.
Ryan takes his cues on business strategy from the school of Profit First. He advocates for sticking to your financial plan, and not reacting to the waves of disruption on a month-to-month basis.

Tune in for an insightful conversation about running your business finances, grading your clients, the three questions you should always ask when making decisions, and why hiring a project manager is a real game changer.

Key takeaways:

• Cut unnecessary expenses and having a real-time view of what you have in each account.
• Grade your clients and deciding who you jump for and who maybe aren’t really a fit.
• Project for profit sharing and charitable donations.
• Identify what only you can do and delegate other tasks to your team.

URLs/resources/social media links:

• Masuga
• Twitter @gomasuga @masuga
• LinkedIn
• Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine by Mike Michalowicz
• The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field by Mike Michalowicz
• Louder Than Ten apprenticeship
• Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits by Greg Crabtree

As a relative newcomer to the custom ecommerce CMS world, Craft Commerce is pushing the envelope with new, powerful authoring and developer capabilities. Brands looking at Shopify Plus, BigCommerce and Magento as options, should add Craft Commerce to their platform review conversations.

With Craft CMS 3 released in April 2018, Craft Commerce 2 just weeks away from its own release, and the excitement around Dot All 2018, I chatted with Pixel & Tonic CEO Brandon Kelly and original primary Commerce developer, Luke Holder.

Listen to learn the back story on Craft Commerce 2 and to see why now is the perfect time to consider Craft Commerce 2 for new store builds of any complexity.

Bonus, Brandon tells about what to expect for Craft CMS 4!

Key takeaways

• The advent of Craft CMS 3 and Craft Commerce 2 will allow the Pixel & Tonic team to focus on rapid iteration of new authoring features, so developers won’t have to worry about breaking changes in a looming Craft CMS update.
• Luke Holder is dedicated fully to the development of Commerce.
• The goal of Commerce Lite is to reach a wider audience that doesn’t require a feature-rich ecommerce store.
• Pixel & Tonic’s marketing efforts will expand to focus on end user businesses, not just developers and agencies, as they release new features that fulfill the needs of whole teams.
• Improved APIs and a plugin store will encourage contributions from the community in the realm of more integrations and data reporting tools.
• This year’s Dot All conference will “turn it up to eleven.”

Resources:

• Craft CMS
• Craft Commerce
• Pixel & Tonic
• Craft CMS on Twitter
• Craft CMS on Facebook
• Dot All 2018
• Dot All on Facebook
• Dot All on Twitter
• Dot All on Instagram
• Foster Commerce