Every order a one-off. Shop maintenance with automated book production.

Framily sells personalized children's books: name, dedication, characters — every book a one-off. The special part sits behind the shop: every order runs through an automated production line in which InDesign scripts on a fleet of physical Macs generate the individual print PDF. When we took over maintenance in 2023, the audit showed: Shopware 5 at end of life, an incompatible payment plugin, a broken CI pipeline — and a production line where every outage meant paid orders weren't produced.

The goal was unambiguous: every paid order gets produced. In addition:

• A stable shop across the revenue-critical Christmas and advent-calendar season.
• Working payments with no failures in the checkout.
• Fast time-to-market for new book titles.
• Transparency whenever something in the chain gets stuck.

The truth about this system: a heterogeneous landscape of Shopware 5, cloud infrastructure, Jenkins CI and physical production Macs that can't simply be "cloudified away". On top of that:

• Five country shops (DE/AT/CH/FR/IT) plus partner and cooperation shops.
• Licensed brand worlds with approval processes.
• The pitfalls of personalization itself: an apostrophe in a child's name can stop an entire production run.

After the purchase, the real magic begins — without a human stepping in: order → print-API middleware → Mac fleet (InDesign) → checked print PDF → print shop. What we repaired and built for it:

• Payment rescued: updated the incompatible Adyen plugin and made the client's own Klarna capture plugin compatible with it — payments run reliably again.
• CI pipeline repaired: Jenkins fixed, updated, and the deployment flow across the entire Mac fleet restored.
• Production errors eliminated: fixed special-character encoding in the InDesign scripts — names with an apostrophe or accent no longer stop a production run.
• Seasonal business secured: advent calendars, Christmas designs and discount campaigns live on time across all five country shops.
• New titles fast to market: book and configurator deployments standardized via Jenkins.
• Data made usable: GA4 conversion tracking completed, BigQuery/Looker dashboards for reports and license accounting.

In 2025 the Mac production line was moved into its own operations project: monitoring via UptimeKuma, clearly defined alerts for stuck orders, S3 file storage — and the switch of all production interfaces to the new shop system during the platform change, including an orderly shutdown of the Shopware 5 instance. Book production kept running right through the system change — and runs to this day.