My wife has asked me to find a replacement for the current content management system we use for her website. Warning: it’s completely, utterly unrelated to CNC: it’s a collection of recipes. She would like something like this site. It needs to be easy to maintain and update, and we’d like some features such as user ratings, user comments, a decent search, links to related articles (similar recipes), navigation aids (e.g. breadcrumbs, navigation sidebar with categories and the contents of the current category), and the ability to switch languages. Some paid ads would be nice too.

I am leaning toward a WordPress site, but I’m not sure what to use for a template. There are a ton of them out there, and the quality seems very variable. I’d like to avoid learning how to make my own WordPress templates. If there are decent free templates for this type of stuff, great, if not, I’m willing to go with a paid solution.

So, I’m asking here for advice.

We’re working to pack existing eShapeoko orders, which is going slower than hoped.

The store is pretty barren of MakerSlide — again…  There’s extruded rail at the fabricator, waiting to be cut, so we’ll restock in January.

We now have 6 mm and 9 mm wide GT2 belt in the store, as well as pulleys:

• Pulleys for 6 mmGT2 belt:
  • 20 teeth, 5 mm bore;
  • 20 teeth, 6.35 mm (0.25″) bore;
  • 20 teeth, 8 mm bore;
  • 16 teeth, 5 mm bore.
• Pulleys for 9 mmGT2 belt:
  • 20 teeth, 5 mm bore;
  • 20 teeth, 6.35 mm (0.25″) bore.

I have designed a 9 mm belt upgrade for the eShapeoko.  The laser-cut parts have arrived, but I’m still waiting for the wider belt idler wheels.  Photos and more details later.

I fixed Ireland and Northern Ireland!

Well. I mean I fixed the shipping calculator in the store. Ireland was a typo I made in the list of countries UPS and other couriers could ship to; in effect, it was not in that list, so only small orders could be shipped there, by Royal Mail (up to 2 kg, and no longer than 60 cm).

Northern Ireland was trickier. The third-party API our store uses to calculate shipping requires the addresses in a specific format, which includes a field for the ISO 3166-2 country subdivision code (e.g. US state, Canadian province etc). It’s optional, because there already is a field for state/province/county/land/canton/district/department/oblast/etc, so the plugin never populated it. After some playing with the API, and noticing an offhand comment in the documentation, I learned that the ISO 3166-2 code was not optional for Northern Ireland: it had to be ‘NIR’ (not blank, and not one of the district codes). Three lines of PHP later, it works!

I have invited another group of people to order their eShapeoko kits, and the orders are coming in.  This covers reservations made until 6 November.  We’re doing our best to ship as many of these as we can in time for Christmas, but some won’t make it.

Reservations made after 6 November won’t arrive in time for Christmas.  Depending on how packing goes for this group, you will receive your invitation in a week or two.

If you reserved a kit and used certain non-English characters in the Name field, your reservation may have been lost.  Letters with umlauts seem to be fine, the letter Ø definitely causes problems.  I found a workaround, so it works now, but I’m afraid there’s no way to find and resurrect the lost reservations.  I’m not sure where the bug is, in WordPress or somewhere in the email system.

I sent confirmation emails for all reservations made on or before 7 November.  If you made a reservation before that date, and have not yet received a confirmation email, please do it again.  Please note in the comments that it’s a duplicate, and the approximate date of the first reservation, so that I can insert it at the right place in the queue.

The factory have extruded more MakerSlide, so the lengths missing from the store will be back as soon as they cut it and ship it to me.

I have resumed inviting people who have reserved eShapeoko kits to place their orders. I will confirm all other reservations soon (working on it), and give you an updated estimate of when you’ll be able to order.

I have shipped all outstanding non-eShapeoko orders as of Thursday, so we’re up to date on that too.

Update

I just sent the confirmation emails for all outstanding reservations. If you made a reservation and haven’t received an email yet, please let me know. Google (Gmail) occasionally swallows my emails with no explanation.

All ordered eShapeoko kits are out (collected yesterday by the couriers).  I have to update the script that sends out tracking numbers, because it seems to be broken.

I still have a bunch of non-eShapeoko orders to ship, a few more than three days old; sorry for making you wait.

I will send a new lot of invitation emails for reserved eShapeoko kits tonight, as well as confirmations for outstanding reservations.

It seems we’re settling into a workable pattern, now that we have a good space to pack kits and other orders, and a more reliable supplier of MakerSlide (still not perfect, but much better than the old one).  I think we might catch up with all reserved kits in four weeks or so, so that we can finally sell the eShapeoko kit from stock.

The missing lengths will be back in stock in about two weeks.

I packed the very old orders, and all but one of the corrections for eShapeoko kits, and generated shipping labels for them.  Some have already been collected.

I am working on more recent orders, and on the eShapeoko kits.

I am not caught up on email yet — there’s still some from last week: sorry about that — but getting there.

I posted a corrected version of the eShapeoko packing lists.  You can find them here (PDF files): version 1.2.1 and version 1.2.2.

I had a terrible week, and I neglected my duties.

• Unanswered email: knee-deep. Will go through it later tonight and tomorrow morning.
• eShapeoko kit corrections: rail packed, small bits picked but not packed for shipping. Need to put them in boxes and padded envelopes, tape them to the rail packs, weigh the packages, and generate shipping labels. Doing that now.
• Non-eShapeoko orders: I have a few orders (with MakerSlide) that are more than a week old that need to be shipped out. Again, the rail is packed and the other parts picked, and I’m doing them tonight.
• eShapeoko orders: will work on those next (tomorrow); I would like to have them collected by the couriers by mid-week. Sorry for taking so long.
• Reserved eShapeoko kits: I’ll invite another set of people to order their kits once these are packed. Thank you for your patience.

The only good news is that I managed to move almost all MakerSlide (except the 2 m lengths) to the new address, so things should go much smoother in the future.