Intro

I decide to try this new approach because I think the chatbots are becoming more valuable becoming very good personal assistance. And this can be a new way to develop the front end of many services in the future.

What MIJO gonna do

It can create a store site with a simple base gatsby template and deploy a static site. When the customer checkout in the store it sends a message (through the chatbot) to the owner telling him about the customer and his order.

Tech Stack

The main stack is NodeJS because of the compatibility with Gatsby which is the static site generator for the stores. And has the SDK for Twilio. For the server and REST API manager the beloved ExpressJS.

Goals

I defined the next goals to end the project:

1. Create the ExpressJS project
2. Customize Gabsty Ecommerce template
3. Integrate with Twilio API
4. Improvements

Progress

I already have the NodeJS Express project generated and working on the customization of the Gabsty e-commerce template to support custom product management with son files and on the checkout, action sends data to the express server.

I chose [https://github.com/parmsang/gatsby-starter-ecommerce/tree/master/src] Gabsty starter for the store template I liked the minimalistic design (THANKS TO parmsang for this beautiful design), but for the site, It has to be customized to remove some functionality and add custom functionality to support the new way of managing the site.

A tricky part here is I want to reuse the node modules folder for the express project and the Gabsty generated sites because of the space consumption of having a lot of sites and each one with its owns node modules.

Next step

I have to make ExpressJS generate a new Gatsby site and publish it in a static folder, the endpoints to add and remove products and the checkout handler. So wait for the next update.