Vision Video, a distributor of faith-based videos, needed a way to automate order entry for their distribution partners. For internal reasons, the company decided it was best to not extend their existing ecommerce site, but to build a separate application for this purpose. Some of the data needed for the site was located in a Filemaker database, while the rest was located in a MS SQL database.

The simplest solution, an off the shelf shopping cart, would not work easily because of these and other constraints. CodeIgniter, however, provided a framework that could work with both of the data sources and fit well into the existing company workflow.

For the front end of the site, much of the code was borrowed from the consumer site and modified to be visually distinct, yet coherent with the company brand. Several content pages, and most of the checkout process, also needed to be created from scratch.

The final site enabled distributors to enter their purchase orders quickly and easily, view product pricing (including custom discount levels based on several parameters), make changes to their accounts, review their order history, and track the status of their orders.

Christian History Institute, a Pennsylvania non-profit organization, recently decided to revive the print edition of Christian History Magazine. Along with this initiative, they desired to consolidate two of their websites into one, reorganize the content, update the design, and add a full-featured storefront.

Having a lot of written content, as well as some specific requirements for ecommerce capabilities, we chose to build the new site on the Lemonstand shopping cart.

Lemonstand allowed us to implement all the desired ecommerce functions with little issue. Since Lemonstand is build on the PHPRoad framework, the remaining content could then be easily implemented through custom modules.

One of the key features of this site is a universal tagging system which links products, articles, magazine issues, historical events, and study material. The site also features multiple payment methods, user priced products (for donations), and direct Mailchimp integration for newsletters.