Danny Halarewich talks about LemonStand, creativity, and small shop development
Limewheel Creative is an agency that creates branding, websites and web applications that are both easy on the eyes, and easy to work with. They recently released a new web store platform, LemonStand, which is now in public beta (a very stable beta at that). You can follow @Limewheel and @LemonStand on Twitter.
Danny’s design work has won several awards and accolades, and is a local inspiration for budding designers like yours truly.
Q. Congratulations on hitting beta with LemonStand, it looks great! What motivated you guys to write a store application?
The motivation behind LemonStand was mostly based on our frustration with other carts on the market. After working on several eCommerce websites, using existing carts, eCommerce frameworks and dabbling with custom developments, we quickly realized there was room to do better. We thought that if we were looking for a great eCommerce solution, a lot of others probably were too. There are simply no self-hosted shopping carts that we know of which truly allow complete flexibility with design and functionality. LemonStand is our attempt at filling that need.
Q. What are your favourite features in LemonStand?
As someone who is first and foremost a designer, my personal favorite is the CMS. Templates, partials, pages, the resource manager and the syntax highlighting code editor… it’s a joy to use them every day. I’m sure Aleksey, our Co-Founder would say the API, as the brilliant programmer that he is, this allows him to do all sorts of amazing things.
Q. LemonStand is more than just another shopping cart: it’s a full store system. What inspired you guys to build such a complete system?
Our objective has been to create a flexible system that could accomodate eCommerce sites of a wide range of complexity. So we put in what we felt were the most useful features for an online retail business. We wanted to provide an alternative to the broken systems we encountered in our careers, and to do that we had to create a robust system, while maintaining a good user experience, usability and relative simplicity for non-technical end users. Being flexible often means being robust. If we only catered to small, simple eCommerce sites then we wouldn’t really be flexible.
Q. LemonStand is built using PHP and JavaScript. Why did you guys pick PHP? Which PHP framework did you use and why not CodeIgniter? I know Limewheel has used CodeIgniter in the past.
We picked PHP because it has a larger user base, easier to deploy (although that’s quickly changing) and has more universal compatibility. We felt those things were important with a self-hosted app.
We needed a highly customizable framework for our application. CodeIgniter is great, but it is not as well organized internally as we needed. We wanted something similar to Ruby On Rails, but written on PHP and with the ability to extend the core framework features. Aleksey started developing PHP Road long before LemonStand came into existence. By the time we started LemonStand it was a mature framework with all the features that we needed. Those features are literally saving months of the development time.
Examples of the features: super-customizable ActiveRecord implementation, which allows adding calculated fields, for example, automatically encrypted columns, and allows one to extend model on the fly. Behaviors – the extensions for the controllers, which allow us to attach form building or list functionality to controllers, with a single line of code. Behaviors do most of the work for us – they build rich forms and display lists. We never code forms and lists manually. All these things make the LemonStand API very flexible. For example, we can extend existing database models (i.e. orders or customers) on the fly, from third-party modules. Once a module adds some column to a model, this column appears in record lists and forms automatically.
Q. About the Javascript libraries. I see Mootools, jQuery, and a few others. Any particular reasons for these tools?
Mootools is used for the actual application, while jQuery is only used on the front-end of our website.
We selected MooTools because the developers are constantly improving it. It is simple and it has fantastic documentation – very well organized and it has great examples. And it has all needed features out of the box. We use jQuery on our website simply because it’s easy to work with and there are lots of readily available plugins available to accomplish interesting effects.
Q. I’ve also noticed that the template language and tools in LemonStand are quite intuitive. What systems inspired your design to follow this pattern?
A lot of these concepts came from an earlier product that Aleksey and I worked on. It was a CMS we were developing. Our main focus on that project was to develop an intuitive templating system that was completely flexible (sound familiar?). Those concepts came from lots of brainstorming together, bouncing ideas off the drawing board and some inspiration was also taken from certain things within Expression Engine.
Q. Limewheel is a lot like 37Signals. You’re small, distributed, and lean heavily on clean and simple. Do you compare yourself to them? Do you draw inspiration from their books or applications?
We definitely draw inspiration from them! They have created some amazing things. Their philosophy to product and technical development resonates with us very well. While we have developed our own viewpoints and strategies that sometimes veer off from theirs, we often refer back to Getting Real and I hold a copy of Defensive Design for the Web close by.
Q. Limewheel has been around for a while, but this is your first product. What is it like funding development with your consulting work? How do you find the time to do both?
It can be very difficult at times, juggling two very different types of work. It can sometimes lead to a hectic schedule and long days. But sometimes you have days or weeks open from client work where you can really focus on your product. There are definitely times when work/life get unbalanced. It’s a constant battle each day. I try to avoid spending too much time thinking about doing things, and just get into doing them. I think that helps me find time to get things done.
Q. You guys consult and build product. Your designs top many of the online design sites. Where do you find your inspirations?
I often ask myself this and I don’t have a definitive answer. I find design is a very natural and untamable thing for me. While I generally look for inspiration by browsing galleries, many times I go in another direction than what I have found. I think I draw inspiration mostly from myself. That means, I draw from past experiences, associations, preferences and things like that. I supplement that with thorough research of the project in question by checking competition, similar concepts but in different markets and even architecture and print design.
Q. Which do you like better, consulting or product development? Where do you see Limewheel going in the future?
Both! While consulting is great because it presents different challenges all of the time, product development is great because I get to stay anchored to something and carry things through the entire life cycle. In the future, I see us launching and nurturing LemonStand. I also see us doing more and more custom eCommerce site design and development using LemonStand. And somewhere beyond that, we’ll create some more products as well.
Q. It looks like the beta is going really well: I’ve seen one store pop already using LemonStand, and I’m sure several more are almost ready for release. Where do you see LemonStand going this year? Are there any big features you’re hoping to add after the beta?
We are working hard to make LemonStand a terrific eCommerce platform and hope that we can build a strong and passionate community around the product. Our Alpha and Beta testers have been great and we thoroughly enjoyed working with them. We look forward to extending our family this year and seeing the development community create lots of interesting modules and themes. We expect LemonStand to be a major player in this market and gain a lot of visibility in the next year.
We have a great list of features we plan to implement as modules. The possibilities with LemonStand are literally limitless, so we have some great things planned. But I think the most useful on that list will be the blog module. We’re already using it on our own site, and we’ll polish it up and release it after 1.0 drops.