Last month we launched the 1001artists.com website. A little less than 4 months were required to give birth to this ambitious web-based art marketplace, conceived by an artist herself, Caroline Perletti, for the artists and their fans, and just about all the lovers of all things art.

The site is in French but the intent is global, and an English version is on the road map.

4 months-long...a global team to deliver from idea to market ... Quite a challenge !

Here is the "making of" story in short words, leaving some of the pain aside and focusing on the constructive aspects of the endeavor.

So what exactly is this 1001artists project about?

It's an online art marketplace, where artists get to show and sell their art directly to customers without intermediaries, no commissions added on top of the genuine price they set themselves for their creations. Ultimately they'll be able to create their own personal gallery on the site.

The site caters for a wide range of categories: from visual art to sculpture, kitchen ware, clothing, jewelry and even leather saddles (les fameuses selles camarguaises!).

When an artist registers on the site, he/she is guided step by step through a simple process where he/she gets to choose a "pack" that best suit his/her need and ambition, and start selling after just a few clicks.

The artists packs are designed to provide a range of services at a fair-price.
One can choose from a free pack, enabling the exhibition of 1 art-piece for a month for free, to a pack "Gogo" offering unlimited artwork exhibition for up to 12 months, for about 250 Euros.

The buyers get to browse a large selection of original art pieces, buy online securely or contact and pay the artist directly.

Caroline Perletti together with Luc Bonnin from Revelis, both located in France, engaged Pantha Corporation to architect, build and launch the 1001artists e-commerce platform.

We setup the operation in a very short period of 2 weeks with our offshore team in India, making it a truly global project:
- business and product owner in France
- project office, including business analysis, testing and some of the frontend development in Australia
- core development team in India

We recommended to use the Magento ecommerce software platform, the community version, as a base. As it seemed most suited with its large range of e-commerce & internationalization features, extensibility and robustness.

However, on the extensibility side , we discovered early on that Magento can be quite an intricate beast to tame. As we ended up extending almost all aspects of the platform, we really had our hands dirty in overriding Mage core modules:

- custom catalog module for the 2 catalogs. One dedicated to the actual art products with some very specific characteristics and a custom product life cycle. Another catalog for the "artist packs" which we implemented as virtual products

- custom checkout module to cater for the dual checkout process. One for the art buyers and one for the artists signing up and purchasing packs.

- custom order workflow requiring among other things a custom sales module with non-standard order and shipment statuses, a whole list of non-standard emails, custom privileges for the artist and the administrator, etc.

- a new module to create the artist identity and to glue all the custom parts together. An artist being a hybrid between a customer, an admin and a vendor. All of it and more with association to be made between the purchased packs with their specific limitations and the related artist's products (such as product expiration date)

- we used and extended one of the numerous community extension (from Unirgy) to manage the drop-shipping functionality and related vendor features

- custom backoffice module to make up for the so called "artist intranet". The artist-seller administration interface became a hybrid construct between the "customer my account" interface, default Mage admin and Unirgy dropship vendor interface.

- creating a special role for the artist-seller with a whole new set of permissions as well as solving session management and other cookies intricacies.

- 2 stores configuration: a main store to sell the art work and an "artist" store to sell the artists packs.

- not to forget the internationalization as we strictly used the Magento i18n system to implement the French stores, in order to make it possible to launch in other languages in the future. We used the NLS extension to manage translation files.

- a custom design package to encompass all the templates and skin parts that we created to integrate the most beautiful yet challenging graphic designs provided by Revelis. Watch closely and you'll notice: "graphical" fonts, round corners, layered images, and transparencies. All of it required quite some smart to put it together from the default skin set provided by Magento. And yet you'll notice it's still not perfect in some browsers...

... and more (custom cron jobs, continuous integration, etc.)

Of course we worked the agile way. It took us 4 releases & 5 sprints to launch and 2 post-launch sprints/releases to actually clean-up and make sure all was working as it should. The current live version is therefore, based on release 1.6 with some additional polishing done by Revelis.

As you may understand lots of brain cells and sweat went into the process, but, we believe, it was worth it...

Enjoy the beauty and consume without moderation