Author: Flamekebab

Winter is over and spring is here – that means it’s time for CHILLCON*! Well, I mean, it was time for it. It was on Saturday and we saw lots of you there!

Some things went well, some went poorly. Thankfully the things that went poorly were relatively minor and the things that went well went really well.

We’ll start with the things that went wrong as there’s always a few:

• We couldn’t find the right size of label paper and ended up doing product labels by hand
• We could only find one of our promotional t-shirts
• We forgot to bring a couple of painted miniatures (again!)
• We forgot to bring a thermos of tea!

I’m sure we’ll find the other shirt eventually – we put it somewhere sensible-oh gods that means it’s gone forever…

Anyway the show was a stonking success and was busier than any we’ve seen so far. We sold out of plenty of things, new and old, and had some wonderful chats with people. We both love it when people stop by to have a natter – wargaming may be a social hobby during a game but much of the rest of the time we’re in small rooms on our own. We even met some people playing Gorkamorka, something I always want to hear about (my first love!).

As usual the lighting in the hall was bizarre (it’s a fierce green-yellow that does strange things to colours) but other than that things were pretty tip-top. Cozzmic Cakes were on hand to provide some excellent deliciousness, at some point Jenny located a glass of mead, and then there was all that wargames stuff too…

We were setup between Atlantis Miniatures (take a look at their female dwarves – they’re brilliant) and Victorious Miniatures (not really our thing model-wise but lovely people!). A good spread of stands filled the hall as well as some games too. The table using The Unseen University Cut-Out Book as terrain being a particular favourite!

For once we were fairly restrained – some tasty things for eating and an airbrush cleaning pot were our main purchases. I did see some terrain I was tempted by but someone else was much more tempted than me and it was long gone by the time I had a chance at it!

Very pleased with the airbrush cleaning pot – it’s already seen use in my ongoing quest to finish an Ork town I started in 2011. Incidentally that was one of the things we released at the show – the Orc Detailing Pack!

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I started it a few years ago for my Ork Battlewagon, Olga, but the intent was always to use them for buildings. The old version of the mould would not cast the large air conditioning unit consistently (due to all the space behind the fan blades) but that’s now been solved and new stuff has been added.

There’ll be a proper product release post about the various things we released in the near future but I wanted to at least write about one of the show debuts!

One thing – someone got a free Orc Warlord from us. Our PayPal reader malfunctioned on the first sale of the day (it behaved itself after that – no one else was that lucky!). We played it safe as we’d hate to charge someone twice (and Jenny tells me he was back later to buy some wheels!). Wherever you are you’re welcome to keep him but I want to see him painted! V8! V8! V8!

Also a massive shout out to Spud – he’s been having a tough time of late but still found time to paint up our limited edition Orc Freebooter Kaptin. We’ll probably have to do a post on him in a bit as he was amazing to sculpt but a nightmare to cast. That said we sold out of him so that’s still an excellent result!

Lastly the cake was particularly delicious this year. Mmm, almondy. Right, roll on CHILLCON Derby!

*I believe it’s supposed to be all caps – not sure why but let’s roll with it!

We’ve had this site a while now – since July 2011 as it happens. At the time we needed some ecommerce software and Jigoshop seemed fairly workable. It had only been out for about a month when we setup our site (it was released on 31st May 2011) although we didn’t start populating our catalogue until August. Back then there were a few other options and the other one I remember trying seems to have been completely wiped from the internet (Zing?). Odd.

I was relatively happy with Jigoshop for a time and it was far more user-friendly than other things I’d encountered. Restocking stuff was a colossal pain in the arse but nothing is perfect.

Given that their core software was free the business model was support and plugins. I bought their shipping plugin so that I could properly handle different weights and locations. That will come back later…

We went on to build up our catalogue and do business. I can’t say I noticed the launch of WooCommerce at the end of September 2011 and I didn’t pay much attention to it in years to come either as it’s a fork of Jigoshop. In software terms that means that at a certain point the code behind Jigoshop was copied as the base for a new bit of software. “Copied” sounds a bit damning but that’s how open source software works much of the time. The codebase is there and if you want to take it in your own direction you’re welcome to it (assuming the project’s licence supports it).

So the idea of there being another, very similar, bit of software to handle ecommerce on WordPress didn’t exactly fire my imagination. Generally speaking with “production” deployments one shouldn’t be aiming to hop to whatever is newest and shiniest – reliability and stability are more important concerns.

Over the years of Jigoshop 1.x (or JigoShop as it was then) the site broke many times. Sometimes it was something I did but more often than not it was due to bugs in Jigoshop. I put up with it though and stayed up all hours to fix things. Migrating to other software was not a task I wanted to undertake. The shipping plugin and its related subsystems would periodically break leading to orders failing to work and customers leaving in frustration without telling us why. So that was fun…

I spent a fair bit of time filing bugs for Jigoshop (to the point where with one update I was responsible for finding a third of the list of things they fixed) but never received any proper gratitude for it. I wasn’t expecting a parade but a “Good catch! Thanks!” wouldn’t have gone amiss. Still, that’s hardly a reason to switch software – I’m not that vindictive.

However last year Jigoshop end-of-lifed the 1.x branch of their software. Users wanting to continue with it would need to move to the 2.x branch. Fair enough, thought I, even if it felt a little rushed.

This next bit is a very real-world result. The “upgrade” didn’t result in everything catching fire. It wasn’t dramatic. What happened instead was that various features were missing, broken, or otherwise problematic.

For example they’d changed a lot of their CSS classes. The CSS I had for buttons no longer worked because instead of .button they were now referring to buttons as .btn. This was true of various things and resulted in me spending quite a while sorting out the site’s CSS rather than, you know, working on models.

You know what else didn’t work properly?

Their migration wizard wasn’t properly built and so countless products (I mean literally hundreds) were not hiding when they were out of stock. Wonderful. I’m fairly sure they never fixed this for deployed sites. I’m told they fixed it in the migration wizard but that’s naff all use to me.

I did my best to track down all the affected products and fix them but I’m sure I missed a few. While I was doing that I also had to fix the way Jigoshop 2.x handles images. Previously they’d been stored in the normal WordPress way (which WooCommerce also uses) but in the 2.x branch they were now stored as attachments!

I’m not really sure what the difference is other than they didn’t bother to migrate the old images. They’d have their main picture and that was it. All the alternate angles I’d taken photos of? Lost in the database. Again, I think they’ve fixed the migration wizard but not bothered with users who have already migrated. Cheers for that.

However, let’s be fair, I wasn’t paying them for support. Admittedly I wasn’t just whining about my problems either – I’d spend time tracking down particular database fields that were affected and compiling detailed reports so that fixing stuff wouldn’t require extensive detective work.

I was paying for their premium shipping plugin though. The thing that had broken many times before. Still – brave new 2.x launch. I’m sure that’ll have been tested thoroughly!

No.

It broke so badly that I wrote a blog post about it.

Incidentally Jigoshop 2.x also didn’t support product weights below 1 kg for a while. Trying to tell it that a product weighed 50g would cause it to error out and reject the input. We sell miniatures. Unsurprisingly they don’t weigh a kilo each. I don’t know who set that field to an integer rather than a float but take that person’s pint away because that was intensely stupid.

They never did fix the restocking issue I was having either. Editing hundreds of products individually for a restock wasn’t very fun. However they did implement an API. I had fun trying to figure out how to use it. Eventually I wrote a restocking script in Python that used it.

Last week though they pushed out another update that broke my site’s CSS and that was it.

No more.

I’ve got enough on my bloody plate without having to worry that orders aren’t being processed because the shipping calculator is poorly written. I shouldn’t have to be concerned that I’m going to have to sacrifice a few days to redo the CSS for my website because they pushed out a stupid update. I am done.

In the intervening years WooCommerce has grown to the point where WordPress reports that there are over 4 million installations active. That doesn’t suggest to me that it’s the best software known to man but it does suggest that it’s well supported and there’s lots of software available for it. It suggests that if they push out an update that breaks stuff there will be a lot of very grumpy users getting in touch within minutes.

Out of interest do you know how many installations of Jigoshop 2.x there are out there?

Over 4 hundred. Yeeeah…

Their Wikipedia page has even been deleted because they’re not considered significant enough anymore. It looked a bit like this, if you’re curious:

So what did I do?

Well I used what I’d learnt writing the restocker and working with Jigoshop’s API to output all our product data and orders. I then installed WooCommerce and used its much saner API to import all the data I’d exported. This wasn’t a trivial task but it wasn’t too bad either. Any proper programmer would manage it without issue, I’d expect, but I couldn’t talk someone through it if the idea of an API scares them.

Once the data was imported I sorted out all the CSS stuff for the site. There’s still a few things I’d like to tweak but with any luck I’ve covered all the major areas.

When it comes to the look of the site I do want to get a bucket load more images to convey what we’re selling. I do my best but there’s only so many hours in the day and having things professionally painted and photographed would mean that some of the weirdly specific stuff we sell would be much less commercially viable. Still, I’m getting better at this whole painting malarky!

I don’t want to make it seem like the transition to WooCommerce was without issues though – it wasn’t. It might have been if I’d changed to a different theme but I’m rather attached to the one we have. Making it work with WooCommerce was fairly easy (I had to add a declaration to the theme’s functions.php file to get some of the more advanced WooCommerce features working).

However there was one rather major flaw – for whatever reason the way the products were queried was buggy. By “queried” I mean anyway one requests products from the database – if you’re doing a search for something specific, looking for all products with the tag “Goblin”, or something like that. Hidden products weren’t properly hidden.

On the plus side they wouldn’t be shown to customers so that limits aggravation somewhat but, well, let me explain. Normally the process would go something like this:

1. Website, show me all the products in the category “Fox Box Goblins“!
2. *website finds all the posts of the type “product” which also have the product category “Fox Box Goblins” and puts them in a list*
3. *website checks the visibility settings and hides products marked “private”*
4. *website checks the stock levels and removes results that are out of stock*
5. *website sees that you want 30 results per page and displays 30 at a time*

WooCommerce was instead doing this:

1. Website, show me all the products in the category “Fox Box Goblins“!
2. *website finds all the posts of the type “product” which also have the product category “Fox Box Goblins” and puts them in a list*
3. *website splits the list into groups of 30*
4. *website removes results that are marked “private”*
5. *website checks the stock levels and removes results that are out of stock*

This resulted in a page of 30 products showing only 21 results on the first page, 16 on the second, and 30 on the third!

In one case it even resulted in the first page being completely empty!

As per usual I solved this myself after a lot of frustrated hours. However it should now stay solved and that’s the important thing. As I said before – I shouldn’t have to worry about the website breaking. I should be worrying about promoting our products, making new ones, and generally doing businessy things.

Speaking of which an order has just come in so I’d best wrap this up!

After the fun we had last year we obviously couldn’t pass up attending Barrage for a second year, once again held at the Blessed William Thingy-Mc-what’s-it school in Stafford. A mighty chariot was purloined for the purposes (well, a mediocre little car was hired anyway) and off we pottered with our MDF product racks and matching t-shirts.

Last year we were in the cafeteria area next to the playing fields which was comfy if a little bit, erm, furnacey. Thankfully this time ’round that area wasn’t used and instead the highlighted areas below were used; spreading the show over three large halls. Where did we find ourselves setup? Right next to the entrance! Wow! See, there’s a little Fox glyph to indicate where and everything.

As with most shows we tried to make sure we had some new stuff and after the success of the Tiny Tank last year, well, we couldn’t resist doing another one:

We got the stall setup and I nipped to the toilets only to find we’d already sold a set by the time I got back! That definitely put a smile on our faces and that was before John got his chance to buy one, which resulted in enormous smiles. That said, whilst John is excellent a big thank you has to go out to all the Barrage crew. They looked after us and even acquired ice and bottled water at the end of the day to stop us from melting in the sweltering heat.

Speaking of which at one point I was having a chat with someone about their game system and noticed the sunlight hitting the wall above them, casting a shadow. The reason that’s worth mentioning is that amongst the shadows I could literally see the heat wafting off the building! We’re not used to that sort of thing in Britain!

That conversation was rather memorable in and of itself as it was with the excellent Connor who I know as Drake Andrews from the Reddit Warhammer Discord. My phone made noises at me and it turned out we were at the same event – small world! He demoed some of the elements of a space combat game he’s been working on, Solar Dominion, and told me of his plans for it. With any luck it’ll soon be available and you lot should exchange currency for it as it sounded elegant and fun, even if you can’t currently shoot yourself by combining light-speed weaponry and FTL travel!

This was also the first time we decided to try something a bit mad. We had a sale at the show. Yeah, we probably should have announced that beforehand but we only decided the night before. Various things got a major show discount – as much as 50% off in some cases. We might have to try that again when we’re at ChillCon Derby (22nd September 2018) – if only to avoid having to remove the sale stickers Jenny spent several hours applying (Go to bed! You’re driving tomorrow!).

Lastly there’s our show purchases to cover, I mean, what’s the point in making a profit if we don’t start spending it before the day’s over?

I grabbed some stuff I didn’t know Vallejo made that Sleeping Dragon were selling as well as an “effect” paint that Army Painter do. With any luck it’ll allow me to show off translucent armour on a certain Orc Warlord model. I also swung by Barwell’s airbrush stand to grab some lubricant stuff and airbrush-ready varnish. Not all that exciting but also not something I could pick up anywhere local either!

Jenny on the other hand found a set of Jack the Ripper themed minis over at Black Pyramid Gaming. I think she’s planning on making a Cluedo set based on the museum she works at – how cool is that?

Anyway, there’s still boxes of stuff on the living room floor so I’d best go deal with that. Hope to see lots of you at ChillCon Derby in a few months!