Most of the year 2018 was taken up by work for a regular client on Upwork, developing their combined shoe and custom insoles web shop. This has been the most substantial project I have been involved with so far, and some of the work is ongoing.
Zoles is powered by WordPress, the WooCommerce plugin, and the Storefont theme. My task was to create custom solutions by hooking into the functionality of the system with my own plugin. The site is multilingual, with translations handled by the WPML plugin. The main site is in Danish, with English and German versions still being developed.
Interface design on the site was initially my own, but has since been updated substantially by the in-house team. We settled on a separation of tasks, where desired functionality was all my work to begin with, but once delivered, the team would use WP editing tools and the child theme CSS stylesheet to change things as needed.
The most substantial part of the work was the interface for configuring custom insoles. We started with a very thorough form, designed as an accordion of screens with jQuery UI. This proved too complex for the average user, but was kept for later deployment with therapists who will appreciate the level of detail. For the second iteration, I created a simpler form, geared toward consumers, which after more user testing was simplified for a third time. Although for the present version of the site, the form is done, it is to be developed still further: the ultimate aim is to obtain insole parameters from a single image of the foot placed on A4 paper, rather than the present requirement of 5 photos.
Due to the complexity of the site, an effort was made to keep the number of plugins to a minimum. Functionality was either developed custom or brought in from the QNRWP-A theme: contact form, MailChimp integration, meta tags, cookie notice, Google Analytics integration, video embeds, etc. Nevertheless, more will need to be done to speed up the website, most likely with a caching solution.
Problems were encountered with image uploading in the insole form. On newer mobiles, photos tend to be quite large, and with 5 of them to be uploaded, failures or “freezes” were common on iPhones. Adjusting Apache and PHP thresholds helped, but did not completely solve the problem. To reduce the size of the uploads, a video capturing solution was developed, using HTML5 features supported in the latest browser versions. Although this works well on Androids, problems were again encountered on iPhones, so the feature is disabled there, in favour of the problematic photo uploading. The situation will be fully resolved when only a single image is required from the customer.
In addition to the web development, work was done on a backend image analysis tool that is still to be completed and will be reported on separately. LetsEncrypt SSL site certification was refactored, using the latest tools, and email serving was secured to eliminate the problem of emails ending in customer spam folders.
Once again, this project was an enjoyable challenge, one that tested the limits of WP and Woo customisation.