I’m Richard Trudel, web developer and Internet juggler. I’ve been working in web development since the 2000s and I started my own business, Québec Studio, in 2017. I’ve always had to innovate when it comes to websites; adapting and evolving alongside emerging technologies is pretty much the heart of what I do.
WordPress: the conventional choice
Early in my career, like most web professionals, I was all in on WordPress. It was fine: an active community, a wide range of plugins that let you do just about anything, but also its share of trouble with updates and security issues. It got me thinking a lot about which direction to take, but back then there were few alternatives offering as many possibilities, apart from Joomla (formerly Mambo, anyone remember that?) and Drupal, which were also starting to stand out.
I still see WordPress as a great content management system, despite its tendency to get cluttered. The challenge often comes from plugins, each with its own design, creating a rather disjointed whole, made worse by the constant upsell prompts for upgrades or add-on products. I’ve always found WordPress a bit awkward in that respect, though that may simply reflect my preference for clean, intuitive user interfaces.
First, replacing WordPress
I explored many options: Joomla, Drupal, October CMS, Statamic, Grav CMS, Bolt CMS, Directus, to name just a few. Each of these platforms has major strengths, but for one reason or another, none struck me as the ideal all-round solution for the variety of projects I had in mind.
Discovering Craft CMS was a turning point. For our clients, it was a revelation: using it became smoother, the admin interface was stripped of anything superfluous, and we had complete freedom on the front end without the usual constraints of ready-made themes. The complications faded away thanks to an intuitive dashboard and extensive customization options, making it possible to control access and content without feeding the chaos.
Craft CMS has grown considerably over the years, with each new version bringing its share of improvements. It lets us use modern frameworks like Vue, Alpine and Tailwind, makes it easy to integrate sending services such as Mailgun or SendGrid, and takes SEO to the next level. Craft CMS also stands out for its flexibility in building content structures, from the simplest to the most elaborate, whether organized hierarchically or by publication date. It natively supports multilingual and multisite management, which avoids relying on plugins that are often sheer torment (WPML, what a nightmare…).
The e-commerce dilemma
Craft CMS offers its own solution, Craft Commerce. Very sophisticated, sure, but expensive, and it requires building everything yourself, from product pages to cart and checkout interfaces. For lack of an alternative, I often found myself going back to WooCommerce, reluctantly.
Ironically, Craft Commerce, powerful as it is and well integrated with its CMS, also ran into limits, particularly because of the narrow range of dedicated plugins. True, I said that too many plugins can be a problem, but in e-commerce, the variety of features you need often forces you to carefully select your plugins, a bit like cherry-picking the best of the bunch.
I also reviewed other platforms such as Magento (Adobe Commerce), PrestaShop, OpenCart and BigCommerce, among others. However, translation difficulties, inflexible designs and the lack of some essential features made these alternatives unsatisfactory for our needs.
The Shopify revelation
I saw Shopify as a turnkey solution, a little too self-contained to adapt to the specifics of our projects. However, a plugin built for Craft CMS changed my mind. It made it possible to manage Shopify products as if they were native to Craft CMS, giving us the flexibility we were looking for.
Thanks to the Shopify API and a wide range of customization options, we were able to blend the shopping experience into the design of our sites, without compromising on looks or performance. Discovering that synergy was a revelation, finally making it possible to add an online store without the usual customization headaches.
Conclusion
By adopting Shopify, we gained stability and options for our clients. No more worrying about backups or maintaining the commerce database. And for those who also have a physical store, it’s perfect: everything is managed in one place.
In short, we made the move to Shopify and we don’t regret it. It has become our winning combination with Craft CMS. We can offer quality e-commerce without compromise. And for me and my team, that’s a great win I just had to share.