Running a Limited Membership Club with a nominal monthly fee of $23.25CAD is the best way I can help you create & manage successful Tienda sites.

Club Commerce: A REAL Club

  I don’t want to belong to any club that will

accept people like me as a member.

-Groucho Marx

My Club Commerce is not your typical Joomla club:

• limited membership — yes, limited!
• Members join to achieve a common purpose beyond just downloading stuff.

My purpose is:

• not selling subscriptions up the wazoo;
• not collecting emails to blast discount coupons hither-and-yon;
• no adwords campaigns, no banner ads, no mass marketing;
• no time spent on marketing @ Full Membership;

My Club is not an excuse to sell stuff. In fact, my subscription gross is capped!

The fact that Groucho may not cut it as a Member of my Club Commerce makes my Joomla Club different from the Joomla Clubs you are used to.

A Real Club: Membership Just For The Few

Other Joomla Club sites have thousands upon thousands of subscribers. Not mine.

I’m supposed to get to know all my Members and be familiar with their Tienda sites. My Members are supposed to be familiar with each other.

A mass-market subscription site is fine for the Other Guys, but a mass-market subscription site would destroy my Club Commerce.

Membership in my Club Commerce is limited to 300 consultants & site owners.

A Real Club: Common Purpose

Traditional clubs are formed for members to achieve a common purpose that is otherwise difficult to achieve individually.

What do Tienda users achieve together? Power! Together, You Are Very Powerful! More than you think.

You should not suffer through the bumps and bruises of using Tienda alone. Your peers are going through the same things you are. Your peers are getting hung up on the same things as you. If you share knowledge of these things amongst yourselves, you will save yourselves enormous frustration.

I can tell you unequivocally that your fellow Tienda user is happy to help you, in return for you being there when they get stuck on some obscure silly corner of Tienda. Your peers will trade knowledge for knowledge because they highly value your knowledge!

The thing is, there’s no where to go that will reliably connect you with your peers. What is the value of having a peer-to-peer network at your fingertips? Priceless!

You have a common purpose with your fellow Members: you are using Tienda to grow your online revenue. You get together to share knowledge and technology to lower costs and save time.

Confession: I Don’t Run My Own Tienda Site!

I specialize in Tienda, but I don’t run my own Tienda sites.

Just like I consulted with Virtuemart all those years yet I never ran my own VM site.

So, my real-life experiences comes from the work I do with my clients. I levered the experience & code gained from their site to my next consulting engagement.

Collectively, you who run Tienda sites for yourself & for your clients amass tremendous knowledge about Tienda.

It is in your best interests to share as much Tienda knowledge and code as you can amongst yourselves. The valuable experiences come from your sites anyways — lever your experiences and code amongst yourselves.

Tienda Users: Use Your Power!

Tienda users and consultants have a practical problem: how to share their knowledge and experiences?

BTW, when I say consultants, I mean the kind of consultants who entrusted me to do their Virtuemart customizations. Consultants who build websites, who do the designing, manage the sub-contractors, integrate different Joomla extensions, migrate data, create articles, set-up the products, and do the training.

My Club facilitates my Members sharing their knowledge and experiences. I’m dedicated to running the Discussion site where this sharing takes place.

What makes my participation so valuable is how I help grow your knowledge base. Since the valuable knowledge happens when problems are encountered, I will research and pursue these problems, capturing it on my Discussion site in real-time so all Members can see the progression. Basicially, you see my consulting. Very valuable!

Add to this: Members participating in the discussions with their tidbits. Very valuable.

I reply personally to all posts in my Discussion site. There has to be someone running the site, and that someone is me. There has to be someone you can complain to when you haven’t heard back, and that someone is me. I’m not going to be accountable to thousands of people who pay nothing to register to a forum site. However, I will accountable to you within my paid Membership site.

The Joomla clubs that I’ve joined over the years are passive. I post a problem and cross my fingers. Within my own Club, I will get to know my Members and the sites they have. And you will too! So, if you post a problem, I’ll know who runs a site similar to yours and can ask them to look at your post. Even with my nascent Membership, I’ve already done this. It is a tremendous advantage to be able to double check something on a similar live site.

Not only are you powerful together, but you are powerful with someone like me actively connecting you to specific Members who can help you out. And Members will be open to helping, because every Member knows the tables will be reversed and they will need everyone else in my Club in their hour of need.

Real Life Case Study: Tienda Version Upgrade

Tienda v0.8.2 was just released (Nov 01/2011). Here’s an excerpt of the announcement:

Due to a number of functional problems in the last version, we encourage all who are using 0.8.0 – 0.8.1 to upgrade to this version (esp. if you are using the OPC).

As with any major upgrade to a large extension like Tienda, we suggest that you always back-up your site… and install on a test server first…

Don’t take my word for it. Take the official Dioscouri word for it: Test upgrades first! I applaud Chris for pointing this out. It is customary to warn about backing up; but, saying to “install on a test server first” is not a usual caveat.

We are being told up-front that blindly upgrading Tienda to the latest release could mess up our live, money-making, production sites.

This is where belonging to my Club can pay off hugely for you: we test new releases together. Different Members test different things. It’s not just a matter of ensuring that the new Tienda version works for you. It’s also a matter of ensuring that there are no surprises lurking to bite you in the you-know-where.

Testing is a huge reason maximum membership is 300, and not 100 or 150 members. We need more sites, not less, to test. We need more experiences with different extensions, templates, and webhosts — not less! 300 is my guess at the outer limit of how many people I can accept into my Club and still maintain the connection and one-on-oneness that I want to achieve. I need to err on the side of a few more members, not less, to tackle testing.

BTW, I am happy letting Dioscouri know about bugs we find and solutions we come up with. What is important is that in my Club have the in-house ability to verify the existence of bugs; and, to test our in-house solutions amongst a decent sample size of Members. Doing more in-house lessens Dioscouri’s burden. Along the same lines, I’m happy to accomodate Dioscouri’s request to test specific things — you, my Members, have to be game for this, of course, because it is you who have the live sites!

We have learned that people who benefit most from Anahitapolis.com services are:

1. Hackerpreneurs (Hacker + Entrepreneurs) who have experience and knowledge in both technology and business development. These are the deadliest warriors in the technology world. Your future competitor is very likely a hackerpreneur.
2. Future Hackerpreneurs: People who don’t have all the technical skills, but have the ambition and commitment to use Anahitapolis.com as a social learning environment to improve and nurture their technical and community management knowledge while we give them the basic building blocks for launching their projects.
3. Any combination of the last 2 who have software development resources. i.e Companies, Startups, and Integrated Project Teams who are either founded by Hackerpreneurs or have hired hackers in their group.

Please Note: I am using the term Hacker as Paul Graham uses it which is a complement amongst our type of species.

These 3 categories are worth investing in, because they are the ones who will most likely be impacting our future lives! If you look at many of the projects on the web that changed our lives (Facebook, twitter, Apple, Google, Amazon, Flickr, WordPress, or Drupal) they have been founded or co-founded by people who fit in one of those 3 categories.

-Rastin Mehr (see Myth #5, scroll down!)

What You Get For Your $23.25CAD/month

Well, you get a Real Club with Membership limited to 300. Members who share your goal to grow their online revenue using Tienda.

You get a unique Discussion group where knowledge is shared.

You save yourself a lot of time and frustration because knowledge tidbits that you need to “get you over the hump” are available to you. And, if not, you ask for help! I reply personally to all posts.

Since we are a connected, intimate Membership we know each other — well, that’s the hope! I will get to know all my Members. So, when you have a problem, I can ask Members with similar sites as yours to help verify/test. It’s not just about your access to me; it is also your ability to connect with your peers in your time of need.

Something else you get is maximum Tienda technology via my Club’s Tienda “Distro”. I will expand on this below.

One reason for the $23.25CAD/month (designed to net to $20 after PayPal fees & Ontario HST) is to be a barrier. Those who don’t ante up the vig don’t get in. Those on the inside know that everyone else is paying a vig, and that matters. A big aspect of a Club is that there is an inside and an outside.

Another reason for the $23.25CAD/month is so I can run my Club, look into problems, maintain my Distro, create tax localization components, create/maintain my “Distro Control Centre” component, create new template over-rides, spend time in my Discussion site, write tutorials (I have a couple already on my Discussion site); and, generally work my tail off for my Members.

My modest monthly fee allows me to provide you with as much Tienda consulting as I can cram into a month. Instead of doing one-on-one client engagements whose work product you never see, I am unleashed to consult for all my Members’ benefit.

Why am I Foresaking Traditional Consulting?

What did I end up doing for end-user and consultant clients with Virtuemart? I spent most of my billable time fixing, stabilizing, and customizing Virtuemart. I stopped building Joomla-Virtuemart sites from end-to-end, and became the Virtuemart technology guy.

Tienda is a growing market, but smaller than Virtuemart. Perhaps not for long, 2012 will be a breakout year for Tienda.

Times are tough. Very tough.

The goal is to get as many money-making Tienda sites up-and-running as we can.

That means lowering your cost of setting up sites for yourself/for your clients, getting your sites to their first order as soon as possible. And then, having a stable Tienda site thereafter with which to grow revenues.

As with any major upgrade to a large extension like Tienda, we suggest that you always install [Tienda] on a test server first.

-Chris Paschen, Dioscouri.com

Real Life Case Study: PayPal Pro SEF and ZIP Download Problem

One Founding Member had Joomla’s SEF enabled, which crapped out the PayPal Pro payment plugin. At checkout’s confirmation, buyers were redirected to the start of checkout instead of proceeding to the Thank You page.

Another Founding Member is not able to use ZIP files for downloadable products.

What do you do when you hit a problem and there’s nothing on the Tienda community forum; nor, on the Tienda projects (Redmine) site?

With more Members I can test on more sites, to better diagnose if the ZIP problem is a hosting issue or a Tienda issue. Same with PayPal, as a number of Members will be running the PP payment plugin.

The ZIP issue does seem to be specific to this host/install. We were quite expedient with PayPal by turning off SEF.

UPDATE (Nov 10/2011): ZIP problem definitely an error with the specific Joomla-Tienda install, and not a hosting/Tienda issue. Spent some time this morning nailing this one.

Open Source Software: You Have Rights!

Do you know that you have the right to adapt open source software?

This right is not the exclusive purview of developers – it is for everyone! You absolutely do not have to accept open source software as-is. You can do whatever you need to do with it to suit your situation. This is your right.

Check out the blue box at the Free Software Foundation. Tienda is distributed under the GPL licence. This is the third paragraph of the preamble:

Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.

Why is this relevant? Tienda is GPL. You have rights! These rights make you powerful. The trick is to harness the power that is yours for the taking.

My Club is the means with which you harness this power.

How? We can take “sharing knowledge and experiences” one step further: I put our shared knowledge and experiences into Tienda.

Early this fall, a recent RocketTheme template conflicted with Tienda’s default category layout. I created a new layout that played nicely with RT. My question to you is: how do I get my handiwork to you, in case you need it?

Sure, just offer this one single file as a separate download. We may end up with a lot of layouts, and at some point you’re going to get irritated with the download routine. How to make it easy for you?

Another scenario: we fix a nasty bug. We submitted the bug report with our fix to Dioscouri. In the meantime, until the next Tienda is released, your Tienda site is without this fix. You manage six Tienda sites that are affected by this bug. In aggregate, we may have 100 Members with 350 sites under their wing affected by this bug. How do we get our fix into your sites?

I get all of our Tienda Goodness to you by downloading Tienda from Dioscouri, adding our custom stuff, and then giving my custom Tienda version to you. In a word, I maintain a private Tienda “Distro” (aka “Distribution”) that you install and upgrade for your sites, instead of using the Tienda direct from Dioscouri.

Each time there is a new Tienda version, I create a new Club Distro. Actually, there’s an intermediate step: testing the new Tienda first; then, creating the Distro. Then you upgrade with my Club’s Distro.

We will have a lot of upgrades. To ease the upgrade process, I installed AkeebaBackup’s “Live Update”. So you go to your site, and upgrade directly from your Joomla Administrator.

Using our own Distro with Live Update is extremely powerful.

I will keep my eye out for all patches, fixes, and whatever else is floating out there, and get them to you via my Club’s Distro.

When we do our own fixes and improvements, you get those immediately.

When something bad is discovered, we can do something about it, send out a MailChimp blast, and have our solution on your site asap.

Frankly speaking, there’s an alternative to using Live Update, called “Continuous Integration”, where changes are pushed to your sites instead of you pulling ‘em in via LU. CI is something to keep in mind — for later!

My doing, and your using, a Club Distro is completely kosher. It’s your right. It’s my right. You can re-distribute my Club’s Distro to your clients — it’s your right!

My Club’s Distro is 100% Tienda. You can revert to the “direct” Tienda and your site will work — albeit without my Club’s Tienda Goodness (which may cause problems) — because it’s Tienda. I do not delete anything, nror reconstitute Tienda into different code to make it proprietary. My Club’s Distro is always 100% Tienda, plus our own goodies on top.

Club Software: Tienda “Distro” and Components

In conjunction with my Distro is my “Distro Control Centre” component, which has fulfills three functions: administrator for my Club’s Tienda Distro; one stop reporting on all Club Software; and, home to tools & utilities that are too small to be stand-alone components.

As much as possible, let’s leave Tienda’s core PHP alone. Especially Tienda’s admin, which is busy enough without our shoe-horning more settings into it. We can tinker with Tienda’s core if we need to, but that code will be administered in this Control Centre component.

Version 1.0 of my Canadian GST/HST/PST is done (using Live Update).

My California tax component is halfway done (over 1,700 municipal tax rates!) (will have Live Update).

I created a proof-of-concept of my Control Centre component. Now that I have a better idea of how it integrates with my Club’s Tienda Distro and my Tax localizations, I am going to rewrite it. You will install the Distro first, then the tax localization (if appropriate), then the Control Centre. The Distro will create new database tables that the other components will populate, so that the Control Centre can report on them.

Because it is your right, and because it makes you powerful, my Club Commerce will have its own base Tienda Suite of Software.

“Oh, now we’re getting to it, Bob is selling software!”. Oh no, no I am not. What I am really selling is consulting and running my Club for you. It’s logical to get as much of your knowledge, your experiences, my consulting, and my running my Club — the sum total of what we do at Club Commerce — into code delivered to your sites.

Localization is a Big Issue. Having written the Canadian Tax add-on for Virtuemart, I did so for Tienda. I wrote a private California Tax add-on for VM, and am creating one for my Club Members for Tienda based on my VM add-on. I’m doing more to genericize my Cali Tax component, to make it easier to whip up other tax localizations (I hope!). I want to nail tax and other localization packages to make it easier/faster to bootstrap Tienda installs.

We should talk about doing different Distros inside my Club. If I can do a Tienda Distro that has my logo on it, why not “white label” it so that your logo is on it — so your clients see your logo, not mine. Add your RSS feed while we’re at it. What if my Club maintained a Joomla Distro for you, not just a Tienda Distro, so you could do an all-in-one install.

My new “Why I am Host for Custom Joomla-Tienda Distros for each Club Member” post delves further.

The RocketTheme tutorial “Creating a Simple Custom CSS Joomla Plug-in” is good.If you want a tutorial, ask; since I create tutorials at the behest of my Members;

When you see things like this, ask me to create a generic plugin so you don’t have to wade through the tutorial. If/when we have a Joomla Distro, we can add this in.

Real Life Case Study: Registration & Checkout Flow

A Founding Member wants me to improve the registration & checkout workflow. Especially the address forms that display in the popup box, as his buyers are getting stuck in these forms.

Tienda is well suited to this type of customization because these are classic “MVC” views. The solution is to create a template over-ride of these views. The intention is that users will use template over-rides extensively.

If I was doing traditional consulting, you’d never see these over-rides. If you asked me to help you improve the screens, I’d start with the over-rides I now have in my back pocket, and you’d pay top rate for ‘em. One over-ride in particular, the shipping/billing address form, everyone will want, because the fields are not spaced well.

For this customization, I took a good look at the Tienda system plugin. With traditional consulting, I would keep this tidbit in my back pocket. But with my Club, I published a topic in my Discussion site at http://www.southlasallecommerce.com/anahita/index.php?option=com_discussions&view=topic&alias=tiendas-system-plugin-over-riding-core-joomla-components&id=445.

It is my you who prompt me into the deeper recesses of Tienda. Real world needs! I’d not have stayed up poring over the code had it not been for this request. Ultimately, we did not touch the system plugin. What we did do, a wonderful Founding Member and I, was check out Tienda with and without this plugin enabled.

This is the real world work that smooths out Tienda’s rough edges. I want you to be the beneficiary of this work. Maybe you think that the Founding Member I worked with does not want to share this work with you. Wrong! In return for me doing all this workflow work at no extra charge, and in return for receiving the fruits of other Members’ efforts in the future, he’s happy to share. A four figure invoice was not presented at month-end.

Is this worth $23.25CAD/month to you?

Groundwork’s been laid.

I created this site with NinjaBoard, AEC, and with various extensions for downloads since I could not decide which download extension to use. I now use Akeeba Release System for downloads.

Instead of Ninjaboard, I am using the Anahita Social Engine, as I want a more “social flavour” to my discussions instead of using the regular forum format. Anahita is packaged as a separate distro, so I installed it as-is as a separate website instead of trying to integrate it with this site.

Upon installing Live Update in my Distro, I created a third site devoted solely to your Live Update requests. So, there are three Club sites: this regular Joomla site for sign-up & downwloads; the Anahita Discussion site; and, a site receiving Live Update requests.

I applied some “hackerpreneur” programming to integrate Anahita with AEC (with LU); and, to integrate the Anahita template with my existing Rockettheme template — good thing Anahita uses Gantry.

There are a few reasons why I am not using JomSocial. One reason is, conceptually, my Discussion site is not an ersatz Facebook site for Tienda users. JomSocial’s templating is not my cup of tea. I want to use Anahita in order to learn it, to get a sense of it, to understand if & how it could integrate with Tienda as a basis for helpdesk, CRM, and front-end “social commerce” — topics to explore inside my Club! In 2012, I want to deepen Member profiles via customizations, and expose these profiles to the public — in conjunction with upcoming Anahita releases.

I’ve been adding knowledge tidbits, tutorials, and general topics on my Discussion site. What was initially “seeding” my Discussion site with topics has turned into — well, turned into my Discussion site! Because there’s participation by some Founding Members, it’s filling out nicely.

I am blessed with seven patient Founding Members, who have been paying my monthly vig without complaint. Only one is an end-user site owner, and the love and devotion he is receiving due to his “only” status is, well, don’t get used to it! He’s been absolutely terrific, and has proven on a small scale the viability of my Club idea. My six consultant Founding Members are real pros, been around the block, and we have various programming skills among ‘em. The ability for some members — not just me! — to tweak this-and-that in-house is tremendous.

A few weeks ago, my 8th Member joined to download my Canadian Tax component. We’ve looked into other issues, and I’ve had the pleasure of introducing myself via Skype.

It’s great to grow my Membership slowly to really get to know my Members. But, such a low membership is detrimental. Membership needs to jump to broaden out our Tienda experiences.

We run five going-concern Tienda sites among us. Two are catalog sites, and all five are Canadian sites. I good nucleus of people and sites.

Along with these sites are the Tienda Distros for v0.7.3 and v0.8.1. I did not recommend v0.8.0 for live sites, so I did not prepare a Distro. When we finish looking at v0.8.2, I’ll prepare the Distro.

Version 1.0 of my Canadian Tax component for Tienda is done. It has Live Update. Three sites are running this component successfully. It is very gratifying!

Halfway done is my California Tax component for Tienda. I am genericizing how I do this one so it can be replicated easily (I say easily un-easily!) for other tax localization components.

My Distro Command Centre component needs a rewrite, now that I’ve done the proof-of-concept version and that I am dropping the Nooku Framework (separate blog post about this forthcoming). I actually have screenshots of my Club Software in a blog post.

This month, besides my Membership Drive, I have to finish my re-done Control Centre component. And update my Distro & Canadian Tax component to accomodate changes in my Control Centre component.

Then, I have to finish my California Tax component.

Then, I have a multiple parent category feature to build for a very patient Derek.

In between, I have a product attributes tutorial to do. I also need to check out Tienda’s coupons, as I submitted bug report about it. Then I have to include coupons in my Tax components.

The groundwork’s been laid. Sites are done. Distro done. Components are cooking. Discussion site active. To-do list ongoing. What I need now is YOU.

Click this link to join.Sign up is very plain, with no extra questions to answer, no vetting.

I use AEC to manage subscriptions, so whatever AEC needs for checkout is the sign-up process.

Please, no barter, no trials. No kidding!