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.