Website 3.0 Launched

We're very pleased to announce the launch of our new website. We're now mobile-friendly, and SSL encrypted (HTTPS). This means nearly any mobile device (smart phone, tablet, etc.) can now view our website with ease. We've also improved the quality of your visit with SSL (HTTPS) encryption for the entire site.

If you're a returning visitor, welcome back! If you're a new visitor, we hope you find our offerings of value and decide to try us!

Technologies we really like and wish to thank

Thinking back, the last big revision of silver-botanicals.com took place in 2012. Four years is a long time--for technology! Just as our site did then, the changes that come now reflect some great open source technologies that we're enthusiastic about.

LAMP

The Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP Stack (LAMP) is the foundation upon which our website runs. LAMP constitues an enormous portion of the web. In fact, demonstrably so, LAMP is one of the biggest open source software successes in history! The World Wide Web as we've known it (then and now) has in large part been delivered to us via LAMP based web servers. Many, many thank yous to all those involved!

MODX

MODX has been with us since 2012. It's an incredible CMS which, thus far has demonstrated the ability to adapt and grow with us. To call it powerful is one thing, but to truly understand it's benefits comes with time and real world application. As a result, we really love this open source project and we intend to use MODX for years to come. A big thank you to the creators, contributors and maintainer surrounding MODX. http://modx.com/

Bootstrap

Designing a responsive website can be tricky. The idea is to have all your pages display well on every possible device/screen out there. It's very doable though with a great project like Bootstrap. Yes, there are other frontend frameworks out there, though for version 3.0 of our website we've chosen Bootstrap. It's been a good experience so far; we'll see if it stands the test of time. http://getbootstrap.com/

modmore

modmore is a really cool company. They're dedicated to creating premium extras (plugins) for MODX. One particular offering of note is ContentBlocks. We think this extra is really brilliant. It makes creating content for our new responsive website a breeze. With it, complex layouts become a trivial task. Plus, when paired with Redactor the experience is enhanced--especially since Redactor respects MODX placeholders, instead of treating it like illegal markup!

Firefox

Firefox is another very important project we rely upon. It facilitates, so much; not just quality web browsing, but it's a powerful web-development platform with bundled tools. Firefox is something we take for granted; although, it's somewhat of a rarity, as nearly every other major web browser is closed source (a black box). Yet, Firefox remains an open source project and still stands toe-to-toe with the rest. Many, many thanks to Firefox--now over a decade in development!

PIWIK

Notice how we do not use Google Analytics ... Analytics serve an important function--to help us understand and improve our website experience for you--and this data is to be treated with great respect! Hence our resolve to keep it out of the hands of 3rd parties, like Google. Thus we have chosen to run our own analytics system upon our own servers; PIWIK https://piwik.org/

HTTPS

HTTPS is now in place across our entire site. There are a lot of good reasons for this practice:

• Encryption
  - any data intercepted through the Internet, between silver-botanicals.com and your computer is worthless to a man-in-the-middle, because it's all encrypted traffic.
• Data integrity
  - data is handled in a stricter manner with various checks in place. Among which is are measures to prevent data form corrupting--all of which is transparent to you.
• Authentication
  - HTTPS involves certificates which are used to verify the correct identity of a website. This provides a number of protections. None the least of which is a variety of man-in-the-middle style attacks.

HTTPS is a very good thing. It's a proven technology and it's essential for e-commerce. We're very pleased to employ it site-wide--not just for shopping pages.

Forthcoming

Although this revision (3.0) doesn't boast a lot of new material, it's organized the assets we have better. Forthcoming will be our next ambitious steps--all home spun and open source:

• A true shopping cart system
  - We're not far off with this. We anticipate the arrival of this mid-2017.
• Bitcoin payment option
  - You may see this before the end of the year. Stay tuned.
• Wholesale & drop-ship features
  - For wholesale and drop-ship accounts we wish to offer you a portal for ordering, plus other features

Stay tuned!