The owners of herbalculture.co.uk, a new start-up selling loose leaf teas, found me on Google and were after someone to help them launch their site.
They had a company build them their website, specifically they had some custom modifications to Woocommerce – a wizard style product where users can create a custom blend tea. The developers had used a jQuery plugin called jquery-steps, which hadn’t been updated in over 5 years, to create the wizard along with some of their own custom javascript.
The setup was a little odd – they had a single ‘dummy’ product over which they inserted this jquery wizard plugin on a custom page template. The plugin seems to work with sessions to store data along it’s steps, and at the end they hooked into Woocommerce to add the product to the cart. There was a backend interface for the client to add/remove product variations – a bit like Advanced Custom Fields – but custom programmed (why?!).
Aside from the peculiar way the devs had gone about this project, they had actually left the client with a half finished job. No metadata from the jquery steps plugin was being populated into Woocommerce orders by their hooks.
My client explained her frustration in being able to find someone that would be able to help her. She had joined what appears to be a fairly popular Woo Facebook group in her search and had had people from Sweden to Texas looking into her site – none of them were able to fathom out the problem.
Luckily she found me and within a few days I had her site fixed and populating metadata into Woocommerce. She had this to say about the experience
Luckily for me, I am also a bit of a tea monster, so she also sent me some loose leaf tea…