I started this project about a week before I signed up here — I don’t know the exact date, but I’m fairly sure it was before June 1st, which is why I checked that box.
It’s real client work: one of my customers needed a website for his print shop, QB Custom Apparel. The deal is that if he likes it, he get me referrals.
The public repo is a sanitized demo. It exists so I could have something in my portfolio without putting my customer’s business information in a public repository, so a lot of the real work isn’t in it. The 3D builder in the repo is a much older version — the whole thing got rewritten in Liquid and JavaScript (instead of the original Python-based version) to run natively inside Shopify, and honestly that rewrite is a project of its own.
The real build is a full store where my customer sells through his own website with actual sales numbers. We use Shopify’s own integrated features plus Drip, a third-party app, for gang sheets — collections of images packed onto a fixed-size print canvas. And we built a full 3D shirt design tool for him, because every tool available at the time was horrible and unusable. Everything is custom; there was no pre-made theme that could work as a base.
It’s a real store and it works. Getting the 3D models right took hours of my life I’m not getting back. The version on the live domain is the release version — what I’m working on now runs on a separate preview theme, basically a playground where I can’t break anything for real customers. It’s a detailed, complicated project, and Shopify’s APIs are the most confusing thing you will ever find.
- 3 devlogs
- 4h
