I spent this morning trying to answer a simple question: what do I actually need from a shop on my Textpattern site?
It should have been straightforward. Stef, aka Bloke, who makes the yab_shop plugin, wrote back to say it doesn’t yet work with Stripe, and the replacement he’s building isn’t finished. He asked what features I need, so he could prioritise.
I thought I knew. But as I tried to answer, I got stuck.
Some things that tripped me up:
- I don’t sell just one type of thing. I sell art (unique and limited editions), physical books, and digital courses. They all want to be sold differently.
- Some things I want available all the time. Others I want to open for a season, then close. For instance, the Magnolia pictures from my gallery show exactly a year ago? I’d love to offer them again now, while it feels timely.
- I could just share individual payment links but ideally I want people to be able to browse, add, and buy several things at once.
- And underneath it all, I realised the problem isn’t really technical. It’s psychological.
One thing that has held me back, I now see, is that much of what I sell is potentially limitless. Digital prints and email courses don’t run out. There’s nothing to count, no stack of boxes gradually falling empty. I have, it’s true, created “limited editions” of my prints – fixing a number beyond which I will not create any more copies – but in very few cases have I actually printed the whole number, yet. I mean: where am I going to store 100 prints of multiple pictures?
Consequently, although I’ve got zillions of things I’d like to share with people, many of those things don’t feel real enough to motivate me to sell them.
What I really want is a shop that helps me work the way I actually do work: in batches, in seasons, in collections that come and go. I want visitors to feel that if they don’t get something now, it might not be available later, because I like to move on.
After a morning untangling all that, I wrote to Stef:
Subject: [3] yab_shop question
Sender: JPF
To: Stef
Date: 4 March 2026
Hi Stef – thank you for the quick and thorough reply.
Been thinking through what I really want from my shop, in case it helps to shape your plan…
I want a shop that’s less like a permanent collection and more of a rotating gallery season. I make work in batches: art, courses, books, and want to open them for limited periods at a time then close them (so I can move on to something else, even if I may later reopen.
Case in point is a collection of pictures I made this time last year to mark the arrival of magnolias in flower. I would have liked to reopen those this week (or soon, anyway).
So my priorities are:
- the ability to open and close collections easily
- a shopping basket so people can buy more than one thing at once
- Stripe, ideally
- categories incl art, courses, books (so I can “see” in advance the architecture of the shop, even if I don’t build them all at once)
In the meantime, I’d be glad to start with just basic products on my Txp site: to show individual artworks as things people can buy, with an image, a price, and a way to add to basket. Fulfilment is simple: I get notified, I manually arrange printing and shipping.
I don’t mind the friction of a shop that isn’t all automated – in fact I slightly prefer the sense of connection with buyers which that necessitates.
I get the sense from your message that I could possibly achieve the basics by installing yab_shop right now, even as it stands (albeit with outdated PayPal API)… Is that right?
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