E-commerce intermediate, Shopify and Ruby on Rails newbie.
How does one go about customizing Shopify files? I have a purchased a theme but want to make some changes to the .liquid files.
Do I have to I unzip, edit, re-zip and upload in the Shopify admin section? is this supported? What are best practices for customizing themes?
You can get started with the instructions here, which can be done straight from the admin interface.
Once you've gained some experience there (try some of the shopify/liquid tutorials), you can take a more comprehensive/custom approach. And btw, you don't need to know Rails, just the Ruby language. In fact, you can even hack away at the liquid codebase if you want.
Good luck!
In addition to #davidchappy s answer:
Would also recommend checking out ThemeKit and Slate so that you don't have to develop from the admin.
Would highly suggest that you sign up for a Shopify Partner account. That would allow you to create development stores. Meaning that you wouldn't have to pay an active monthly subscription before you are ready to actually receive money.
Would also give you a great dev store to work on directly with ThemeKit so you can test everything before using ThemeKit to deploy to your production (live) webshop.
All you need to do is set up a private app that allows you to read/write to theme files.
Related
I would like to develop a chatbot directly inside my Rails app (maybe whatsapp/messenger in the future, but let's begin within my app first).
I've checked online but I find a lot of different ressources and I am not sure which tools I should use.
The chatbot is not for marketing purposes only, it should be able to interact with my controllers and give back some content to the user.
For exemple, I want the user to be able to ask "what is my balance?" or "show me my last transaction" or "how many bills do I have to pay this month?"
In the future I would like to use ML to make the bot "smarter" and make suggestions to the user, but that's not a priority.
What tools and what steps would you recommend to follow in order to achieve this?
Any gems you recommend? Any tutorial that could help?
Is it possible to do this inside my rails app and using Ruby?
I am ready to try by myself but the content I find on Google is messy and I want to know the best way to do this so I don't lose hours with software that are not really good..
Thanks for your help
You cannot configure bot inside your rails app but you can create separate rack for creating bot. stealth is good one.
Read doc for configuring it with rails.
I'm at the point in my application where I would like to integrate a saas solution into my application using ruby on rails. So far everything has been good except I am unsure where to begin.
My Idea:
I would create a subscription.rb and plan.rb model. A user would belong to subscription and subscription would have many users. Next subscriptions would have many plans and plans would belong to subscription. I would then add role for each plan to limit a user from certain parts of the application maybe using cancan. After setting everything up I would integrate stripe into my application to handle the payment side of things.
The above is how I am thinking of setting this up. It may truly be the wrong concept but that is why I wrote it so you could get an understanding of what I am thinking. I know I could use third party services like recurly, chargify, etc but I am opening my eyes to see if this can be done using a similar a approach.
What technologies have you used or prefer to use when creating a saas application?
Is my approach wrong? If so what is a better way to approach this?
Any tips or advice for creating a saas application such as technologies, ruby on rails tools etc.
Take a look at the open source example application for a Rails Membership/Subscription/SaaS Site from the RailsApps project. It comes with a tutorial that explains the implementation in great detail. Here's the libraries it uses:
Devise for authentication
CanCan for authorization
Stripe for recurring billing
Twitter Bootstrap for front-end CSS
Using Stripe for billing makes implementation easy and reduces security risks as Stripe handles all the automated recurring billing.
The RailsApps example puts CanCan together with Rolify and uses roles that correspond with subscription plans to manage user access. It shows how to simplify the architecture so there's no need for the complexity of a subscription.rb or plan.rb model (though you could refactor that if you wanted to).
1) I use MongoDB as the db backend for the flexibility, RSpec for TDD, HAML/SASS, and RailsAdmin for a quick admin dashboard.
2) Its not necessarily wrong, but its up to you in terms of what you plan on allowing users to do.
3) So wait, have you already developed your tool or are you asking us to plan your tool. Also, what kind of Saas application did you intend to build?
I am investigating potential Rails plugins or Gems to help develop a SAAS type app. Specifically I am looking for help in two areas:
Restricting access to certain areas of the app based on the account's plan. For example, a bronze account allows access to some functionality, upgrading to silver unlocks access to new features and functionality. Basically, just controlling what accounts have access to what controllers.
Managing subscriptions, invoicing and taking payments. This app will be charging on an annual or quarterly basis, there's a 30 day free trial with no payment details needed up front, and I think the intention is to use PayPal Website Payments Pro (although that is not set in stone).
Given the above, can anyone recommend any Gems or plugins? I have had a look at the SAAS Railskit and I am not opposed to spending a bit of money. However, I'd certainly want to hear good things from people who have used it first, and also how easy it is to pick appart the Railskit and apply it to my own application (as I am not starting from scratch here - needs to integrate with Authlogic too).
Thanks in advance for your help.
Bruno Bornsztein offers a Rails engine that implements a SaaS site. Look for striped_rails on GitHub.
You might want to look at the open source example application for a Rails Membership/Subscription/SaaS Site from the RailsApps project. It comes with a tutorial that explains the implementation in great detail. It does what you describe using Devise for authentication and Stripe for billing.
My SaaS Rails Kit does integrate well with pre-existing apps... many of my customers do that. And the testimonials at the site are real. :) Plus there are many other similar testimonials that I haven't published -- a lot of good things have been said about it. :)
While there are quite a few different gems out there which do different things different ways, I would definitely suggest that you start with these:
activemerchant — I would use this for payment processing. It is honestly the best (and most extensible) gem out there, and its especially well-tested for PayPal usage, although I'd look elsewhere for SaaS billing because PayPal is utter crap.
declarative_authorization — This is probably the most extensible plugin for authorization, which allows different users with different roles to do different things. For instance, you can build roles for each plan.
You should also take a look at the following Railscasts:
"Declarative Authorization" - http://railscasts.com/episodes/188-declarative-authorization
"Authorization with CanCan" - http://railscasts.com/episodes/192-authorization-with-cancan
"PayPal Express Checkout" - http://railscasts.com/episodes/146-paypal-express-checkout
"Integrating Active Merchant" - http://railscasts.com/episodes/145-integrating-active-merchant
Hope this helps!
You would also need subdomain routes, for restricting your user into its own subdomain.
I have to develop a online product catalog which will eventually developed into a simple online ordering system, I have never developed a web application before. Please recommend an application framework which might be a good choice for this kind of apps.
Is Ruby on Rails a good choice?
Thanks.
Definitely Ruby on Rails a Good Canditate for developing online e-commerce application , There are many e-commerce application developed in Ruby on Rails , which are successfully running .
Open source e-commerce application spree
Shopify CMS for online store .
Agile web development book has explained the working of rails with an example how to develop a product catalog , which will be more helpful for you.
Many plugins and gems available for payment gateway like the Payment gem .
What more you could need to develop an online store .If your resources are less and the development time should be speedy then rails a good candidate for your requirement.
Finally its your interest and skills set and choose the platform which suits your requirement :)
Hope this helps !
Rails is as a good choice as any other web framework can be.
Here are a few links to help you getting started with it.
The Guides
The Screencasts
The Agile Web Development with Rails book
And for your online ordering feature, you could look at Active Merchant.
Is it necessary to develop it yourself?
There are a number of great drop in solutions for a catalog/shop application. Some offer both the source code for customized deployment, others offer a package including hosting, setup and maintenance. In addition to what's already been mentioned, here are a few more e-commerce solutions that are ready to do.
Keep your hosting solution in mind when deciding how to proceed. A lot more hosts offer PHP than rails.
PHP Based ZenCart (Both)
Django Based Satchmo (Source only)
Rails Shopify (Hosted only)
Do you really want to reinvent the wheel?
If you've never written a web application before do NOT start with something that involves billing. That's a good way to end up in a lot of trouble. Billing is hard to get right, and if you get it wrong you can end up facing huge fines or even in court. In most cases, you have to comply with PCI DSS security standards, and if you fail to do so and information is lost or stolen, you're likely looking at $500,000 in fines.
If you absolutely must do e-commerce, outsource it to PayPal or Google Checkout so that your risk is limited mainly to charging people the wrong amount by accident.
That warning out of the way, Rails is a good place to start if you've never done web development before. It has it's problems, but they'll go unnoticed until you've been working with it for at least two or three years. i.e., they're fairly minor, and are likely to annoy only a very experienced developer with significant project requirements.
Full disclosure: Google is my employer, so obviously I think you should opt for the Google Checkout option.
I was planning on using RoR for an upcoming e-commerce site but keep reading
comments that give the impression that this framework is not yet fit for this type of a commercial application.
What is the state of it? May it be used for large scale online stores etc?
Is compatibility and the frequently changing framework an issue to worry about?
Late answer... but I feel I should share some of the latest stuff available.
Is compatibility and the frequently
changing framework an issue to worry
about?
No. But it sounds like you are a beginner with Rails -- anyone starting a big e-commerce project should consider sticking with a framework they are already comfortable with.
If you definitely want a Rails app and your site is primarily an e-commerce shopping site, I recommend you look at Spree (http://spreecommerce.com/).
If your site is primarily a web application with a small purchasing component, consider using ActiveMerchant directly to hack together your own simple shopping page.
If you are making a primarily e-commerce shopping site, you would do well to at least consider non-Rails solutions. There are so many options for standalone web stores, shopping carts linked to CMS apps like WordPress and Drupal, third-party services for a fee (e.g., Shopify for shops, Chargify for subscription services) and many of them can be customized with minimal coding.
Rails is up to the task, but if you aren't already a "Rails guy" there's no particular reason to choose it for a new e-commerce app.
yes, rails can do it quite well. check out active merchant site, as well as shopify, which is a rails site specifically for ecommerce. as far as changes to the framework, i've found them pretty easy to keep up with on our applications.
Agree with other's posts about activemerchant. That combined with someone like Braintree as the gateway (who are programmer oriented) make it pretty simple to do.
It depends on what features you want in your system.
Chris mentioned some tools for payment processing and order / cart management.
If you want something for a 'large scale online store' then I'm not sure there is anything yet. Specifically when I worked with ATG Dynamo Commerce Server, there was a massive amount of effort invested in their pricing, discount and promotion elements.
Very late to answer but try out http://www.ror-e.com
https://github.com/drhenner/ror_ecommerce
Disclaimer: I wrote it, but it is more developer friendly and starts you off with a lot of best practices baked in. Good luck