Online Farmers' Market System

January 22, 2007 4:25 PM

Online Farmers' Market System
After running my local online farmers' market for five years using a mess of bastardized open source php projects and unsuccessfully trying to get other markets to follow my steps, I finally re-wrote the entire system from the ground up as a fully hosted, drop-dead simple, ruby on rails application. In less than 15 minutes, a market (or a single grower) can go from nothing to selling produce to local customers.

My own market was moved over to the new system this week. You can find it at athens.locallygrown.net.

In the several months it took me to write this, several other groups of growers followed closely behind, using what I had working to get their own markets started. In the upcoming months, you'll find markets across the country using this system. And judging from how it's changed the way people in north-east Georgia buy locally grown food, it may do for locally grown produce what Amazon.com has done for books.
posted by ewagoner (0 comments total)