Learn early that business is about *money* and *time*. If you aren’t making people money, saving them money or saving them time, you don’t have a business, you have a hobby.

The only modification I would make is that, you may not need to save the time or money, at least have them think they are.

There are fixes in the support forum, but I would suggest waiting for v1.01 at a minimum.

SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1062 Duplicate entry ‘bqE28udxgWSfKTpH2U8SDvptZ7T_dRP6dEpCPPDGJuU’ for key ‘hash’

Unfortunately there is no documentation for the redirect module, but after looking through the code, I was able to come up with a modification to the import script that deletes out the relevant redirects.

Below is a generic version of the relevant code. It does depend on knowing either the old or new url. In this from alias we know the new.

$deletedCount = 0;
$nodeTypes = array('type1', 'type2');

$nodeList = "'" . implode("','", $nodeTypes) . "'";
//fetch the nodes we want to delete
$query = "SELECT nid, type FROM {node} WHERE type IN($nodeList)";

$result = db_query($query);
foreach ($result as $row) {
	// Need to delete any redirects attached to a node otherwise duplicate key issues when try and save later
	$node = node_load($row->nid);
	// We need either redirect from or to for delete. We can get the to based on alias.
	$alias = drupal_lookup_path('alias', 'node/' . $node->nid);
	if ($alias) {
		redirect_delete_by_path($alias);
	}
	// Now we can delete the actual content
	node_delete($row->nid);
	$deletedCount += 1;
}

Best of luck Flowerella.

Features

Having a core WP developer like Mark Jaquith give WooCommerce a security audit is a good move, especially given the relative immaturity of the plugin code.
The feature list of the 2 plugins are still pretty similar and this is to be expected given the short time of the split. An interesting difference is that WooCommerce has built in HTML emails & up-sells / cross-sells functionality. These are premium paid extras in Jigoshop. But is it based on the same code? If so, an interesting way to undercut the competitors financial model. There are other paid extensions for both systems with some cross over.

Download

Ok, I still have serious reservations, but lets download and compare if there is a compelling reason to switch to WooCommerce. Hit the download button and up pops a window, “REGISTER TO DOWNLOAD THIS PRODUCT”. You have to be kidding me, and at that point I shut down the tab for that site. No thanks WooCommerce.

So that door closes but I am not sure which door will be next for me. I like the combination of being part developer, part system admin. The one area I would like to pursue is around improved dev processes. Its the area I wanted to improve at McCann but there never seemed to be the time.

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Lack of clear direction

One mistake I can readily admit over these years is a lack of clear direction. At times the business has been part:

1. Full service web company
2. Hired gun contractor / freelancer inside other organisations
3. Web site content with income from advertising
4. Web site services with pay for use

Number 2 has been by far the most successful in a monetary sense with the others suffering from being a small fish in a big wide sea. This is not to say the time spent on them has been wasted. I have learnt a lot about business models, promotion & marketing amongst other non technical skills. But it did have me wearing too many hats, and results suffered because of this.

Current Focus

Over the last 6 months I have consciously been moving to a situation where the company structure is purely to support my freelance software development. No more trying to build the next big thing by myself or compete for small fry work from small companies where the dollar cost seems more important than the benefit that can be derived from their web presence.
The core skills are still developing in a Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP environment. Working with customising WordPress as a CMS has become much more prevalent, and I have been putting effort into taking my front end web skills around javascript and jQuery to another level. I still like to use my skills working with relational databases.

For the Future

A few ideas for the future.

• Finding & working with other skilled professionals on a project by project basis. Whether they be a project manager, graphic designer, marketer or other developers.
• Writing more here and sharing some of what I have leant from a technical perspective.
• Releasing more code when I am in a legal position to do so under a free license. I have lots of custom WordPress plugins and modifications to other plugins that others should find useful.
• Understand more about non relational databases
• Learn and do more development for mobile platforms