Dogfooding

Mark Hamstra | March 13, 2023

I'm a big fan of dogfooding, the practice of using your own products and services to make those products and services.

In the context of modmore, that means the articles on this blog (and others, like MODX.today and my neglected personal website) are written with Redactor, ContentBlocks is used to build sectioned landing pages, and SiteDash is enabled on all the sites that I manage and I'm typically the first to upgrades sites remotely that way.

One particular glaring omission has, until this weekend, been Commerce.

After spending a few weeks on developing some custom integrations to bridge existing applications (like the package provider) into Commerce, endlessly tweaking a Commerce theme (including emails and invoices) that would make a good case study, and battling with a legacy billing that broke down entirely after adding Commerce, I'm super excited that you can now buy your Commerce licenses... through Commerce!

Just going through the process of implementing a project of this complexity is invaluable. It surfaced a few bugs (all fixed in 1.3.0-rc6), led to a few new feature ideas/improvements, and will certainly be an excellent test bed to try out some new features moving forward.

Be sure to check it out and use coupon code commerce for 5% off until the end of the March. :)

Along with this billing update, various content has been updated, the login/signup pages have received a much needed redesign, and various other minor tweaks have been made all across the site. As we're approaching our 10 year anniversary, there was plenty to clean up.

Finally, two things worth noting:

  • The legacy billing engine will still be used for two things: unlimited license subscriptions, and manual billing (i.e. premium support and other consultancy work). These are of course features we're looking to move over to Commerce as soon as we can, but for the time being those will remain separate. 
  • Our affiliate program is on hold for now. If you have an existing balance, get in touch to have that paid out or turned into a coupon code to use in the new checkout. Later this year, we'll also start work on a new affiliate program that gives more people the opportunity to benefit from referrals.

If you have any questions about how certain things are set up, please do ask. I'd be happy to do a follow-up with more technical details.