Headless FluentCart
I set out on an experiment: could I build a working "headless" FluentCart? I started with some really ambitious requirements: one store, branded emails, a totally static site, all "store items" coming from the WordPress install and that install shouldn't be publicly totally open i.e locked down as much as possible.
I started with a clear guideline: static, digital-only sales, and smashed it. I rebuilt what I learnt into a redeployable solution over and over again, iterating, fixing the issues, and learning as I go. The whole cart experience is delivered via API and a single JS file. You can map any HTML to almost any amount of data.
My first video on that project is here. For those of you who follow me on Twitter, I have been posting updates there, but for those who don't, I released a Video earlier in the week on the progress.
I have been working on refinement and fixing bugs, and I have made significant progress on shipping and a more cart-like experience, including pulling data from the WordPress store. My first physical goods static store is now working, and it's actually doing well: https://sunwardshades.staticsites.co.uk/. The physical store bugs have been fixed, and I continue to work on it.
It's a functionality I'd love to see become core; it fits a static market so well, and it's really impressive what can be done once you start understanding how it works.
There are limits: FluentCart doesn't support multiple payment gateways (i.e 4 Stripe accounts) it wasn't designed this way. But building stores like this, my little test installation is now supporting 7 static sites for testing and R&D All store support a mix of Paddle and Stripe (I haven't been able to test PayPal, although it's coded, because I can't get a working sandbox account for some reason)
I thought I would share it here and see if anyone had done anything similar yet?
An updated video will come out later in the week once I iron out the last couple of shopping cart bugs, but I am pretty close to what I would consider a minimum viable product for this sort of thing, and I am sure I will get some use out of the work I've put in now. I have to, as it's taken me quite a lot of time to get it right.
I would love to see this in the plugin in some guise in the future too as a native solution.
this is cool - thanks for sharing what you've been doing.
Nice experiment, thanks for sharing
I've been wondering whether this was possible - I'm glad it's you that undertook the experiment. Looking forward to watching!
nice one! I did one Next app with fluentcart headless too. But I went a bit different route - I made a fork of FC, added extra api I needed, stripped bloat that wasn't needed for this project and it works.... damn, it works really good!