As some of you may know, I offer commercial WordPress plugins over at plugins.leewillis.co.uk. I started the store back in April 2011, and at the time the only real e-Commerce solution for WordPress was WP e-Commerce. My store’s run rock solidly on WP e-Commerce for the past 3 years, and I’ve constantly been impressed by the core team’s ability to manage the complexity of supporting legacy features, installs and themes.

Scratching my own itches building, and running my store served admirably as a source of ideas for many of my free, and paid-for extensions. However, for the last 6 months or so, I’ve been planning a bit of a spring clean. A redesign was on the cards, and there were a few things I’d implemented that have worked OK, but could do with a second iteration and a bit of clearing up – particularly the documentation areas and the product information sections.

There’s a fair amount of bespoke code behind the current solution, from the licensing engine, documentation architecture, and a few other handy tools I use to handle support efficiently. When I talked at WordCamp London in November, hopefully I was clear that I’m a big fan of not re-inventing the wheel. So, I took the opportunity to review what was out there that would allow me to minimize bespoke code.

While I still think WP e-Commerce is a great solution for a lot of stores, it seemed overkill for my own requirements. Fortunately one of the plugins to have arrived in the last few years is targeted specifically at digital products. Easy Digital Downloads also provides some great add-ons that are going to help me minimise the amount of custom code powering my store.

So, with a bit of a heavy heart, I’ve decided to move my store over to Easy Digital Downloads.

I’ll certainly still be working with WP e-Commerce regularly (Actually, I’m looking forward to some changes with the store freeing up a bit more of my time to help out again!), not to mention WooCommerce, but I have to say I’m a little bit excited to spend a little bit more time with EDD.

Addendum: I’ve realised how infrequently I actually use WordPress for blogging, so I’m going to use this exercise to make me blog a little more. I’ll be covering the process, the extensions I’m using, and hopefully also any shareable code that comes out of the process – watch this space …

 Disclaimer: The easy digital downloads links in this post include an affiliate code.