When people talk about the ‘stack’, generally they are referring to the back-end tech that powers a particular application.  Could be any application, but in the case of this blog I am referring to the back-end that powers the eCommerce sites I create.

In the spirit of bootstrapping, it should come as no surprise that I am a fan of Open Source and PHP.  Back in the day, I would have hand coded whatever site I was designing.  But nowadays I lean on the great community of Open Source developers. I do ‘dig in’ to the code every once and awhile when I need to customize something for the sites.  But I’m in the product development and brand development business, so that’s where I concentrate my efforts.

The basic ‘stack’ I use on all sites:

  • CMS – WordPress.  It’s the most popular Content Management System in the world, and a great foundation to build a site on.
  • Theme – Avada. Their sites boasts that it is the “#1 Selling Theme of All Time”.  OK, great.  What it is for a site is a very customizable responsive theme.
  • eCommerce – WooCommerce. Their sites says that “…WooCommerce powers over 28% of all online stores”. Pretty impressive. The platform is solid and the plugins available for it are vast.
  • Card Processing – Stripe. They take care of PCI Compliance, their plugin is very easy to implement and they have great fraud protection.
  • SEO – Yoast. Simply the best SEO plugin available for a WordPress site.

Like I said, those are the basics. At the time of this writing, I have 26 active plugins on the Two Fisted Drinker site.  I am always trying new plugins and always looking for good recommendations.  In future posts, I will dive into each of the basic plugins I listed plus share many more.