NFT Integration

Site URL: https://www.dylanwhite.me/

Are there any official plans for supporting NFT integration on squarespace ?

There is a workaround on one of the forums with iframes / opensea but I couldn’t seem to get it to work with IPFS.

As many visual artists increasingly look to sell NFTs either via marketplaces and / or free storefront hub services such as lynkfire, linktree etc I am increasingly wondering why I pay for 2 squarespace sites. 

Please let me know if you’ve any NFT integration plans soon or I will probably just transfer my url to a linktree that points to hen, fnd, objkt et al. 

thanks again 

Dylan

Agreed

Get on the boat or be left behind. Squarespace needs to offer full web3 integrations with dapps and more. I am comfortable with squarespace and have built many sites here, but now I'm tired of the restrictions. I want to integrate metamask and other wallets, NFTs - buy and sell, and so much more. Going to leave Squarespace forever if they don't react quickly. 

Im looking at returning to my old hosting provider for this reason alone.

There's a few things to unpack here I guess, but I suppose the first thing is that this particular part of the forum isn't really for feature requests. If you want to customise Squarespace then there are individuals who can help you here. they don't work for Squarespace though.

OK, let's talk about NFTs. Nothing too polemical here, plenty of other places to argue about their value, their cost, the technology etc, but should say that I am very pro-blockchain/web3, and work and research within that sphere pretty much every day. So, we'll focus on NFTs and Squarespace (seeing as that's the forum we're in).

In my opinion there are some fundamental concepts that one needs to consider here. Squarespace is essentially a web2 company, and act as a trusted third party. that means that they are taking control of a lot of things for you on the back end, and owning the data, building the product etc. When you upload product information to SQS you're putting it in a database they run, maintain and protect. That means that they run a lot of server side code. that's code that we as end users can't get to and modify. When we customise Squarespace we work only with browser rendered CSS or scripts, executed client side. That does give us good opportunities with web3 though... 

with web3 / nft stuff the data and the source code are on the public blockchain. when you go to OpenSea or Hic Et Nunc you're interacting with their smart contracts on the blockchain, not (for the most part) with server side code or their third party databases. because of that all/most the interactions you see are done with client-side code that calls the contracts. Same with *any* site that is integrating metamask. So, if you want to integrate metamask in squarespace, you can (with premium subscription) as you can add Javascript code blocks.

In addition, the vast majority of NFTs aren't "on chain" and as such exist simply as URLs usually on IPFS or similar content-addressed networks. so you can easily add those things as simple img elements in a code block if you want. 

There's another reason that you probably want to sell things on dedicated NFT marketplaces though, is that the royalty payments are usually run on the marketplace contract, not your NFT contract. so you really need your customers to interact with that contract, not a middleman contract that Squarespace would have to write and run themselves (because the royalty payment might not be in there!)

So there are routes you could go down to integrate metamask, NFT collections, smart contracts etc. That's not to say that Squarespace shouldn't go down that route, I'm sure they will at some time, probably first through adding crypto payment providers. (At the moment, there is no integration of crypto payments with Squarespace but I'm sure that could happen, Stripe stopped Bitcoin payments 3 years ago but recently have said that they would consider crypto payments again). 

FWIW, I think squarespace could do a good job on this sort of thing. Web 3 stuff needs Web 2 quality UIs to on-board new people, but it's not there yet. My guess is that if you're getting a lot of benefit from using squarespace through design and no-code experiences, and the NFT part is relatively small part then integrating a bit of javascript or an iframe embed for now is probably not a bad idea. 

If there's a particular example you want to see connecting metamask within a squarespace page I'd be happy to write and put up an example. It would be an interesting exercise and there are lots of possibilities. For example, you could go down the route that people often use when integrating shopify which is to add the products in squarespace and then replace the buy button in code. 

If you think we need a squarespace plug-in to do this sort of thing and it looks worth it, again, tell me what you're looking for and I'm sure I could write one.

EDIT: forgive any kind of basic explanations here or any explanations that gloss over stuff, just trying to write something that might be useful to people finding NFT type stuff and no idea what peoples understanding of it is or technical capability is. My main point in this is that I'm not sure its the right thing to give over web3 stuff to a web2 company, or very productive to slate a web2 company for not doing web3 things, but I'm happy to help customise existing squarespace sites with web3 type interactions using javascript (as is the remit of this forum). WAGMI

Thanks Dave!

Hi Dave, thanks ever so for your thoughtful reply. 

I did think this was the official SS forum and didn’t realise it was a message board for devs and general ideas, so apologies there ! 

I hear you, and appreciate squarespace is a web2 behemoth; I’m not expecting anything like wallet integration. 

Like many artists I use squarespace as a very quick and easy portfolio index. All I would like is to be able to add a click through functionality to each image on my front end gallery page. 

Click on image and link straight through to the listing page of an external NFT website instead of popping up a subsidiary squarespace gallery page. 

Do you know if there is any simple code that could help to do that ?

Squarespace have been no help, and i fear if they don’t try to keep up, there’ll probably soon be toast.  

All best 

Dylan 

Hi @dylanwhite1570048433! 

The use case you described can be achieved in a lot of ways, but if you're on 7.1 then I'd just add a blank page, and then insert a gallery section and in that you can set the link to the picture. no coding required. It sounds like maybe you're using one of their portfolio pages but that's a different use case that provides a whole complex page underneath the specific item. I'd avoid that if you just want pictures that link through to hic et nunc, opensea or similar.

if you're trying to do it using a gallery block, then click the little settings icon by hovering of the image thumbnail once you've loaded it up and you'll get a dialog that you can use to set the click-through link:

If I've misunderstood and you're using a different technique to get your images on squarespace then let me know, as there are plenty of code options here to add your images using markdown blocks or code blocks, but I'd try and stick to Squarespaces in-built functionality if you can.

FWIW, I think Squarespace and similar sites will integrate NFT sales at some point, and they'll do it well. Probably when they've been rebranded away from "NFTs" to "digital assets" or similar and more people are interacting with digital assets (whether they know it or not). Squarespace has a large market, but my guess is that the percentage of that current market who want to sell NFTs is small. When it gets big enough I'm sure SQS will implement features to allow it. They exist for the creators and as more creators seek to monetize their work this way you can be sure Squarespace will enable them. 

Thanks Dave, really appreciate it. 
 

7.1 here we come … 😅

@iamdavehart Hiya! I'm wondering if you or anybody at squarespace or another forum member might know if there's an integration, code injection, or some kind of widget to authenticate or verify nft/wallet like collab.land for discord? I'm interested in using the membership areas as a gated community, rather than paid.

Thank you for any help!!

L

20 hours ago, laurelbdesign said:

@iamdavehart Hiya! I'm wondering if you or anybody at squarespace or another forum member might know if there's an integration, code injection, or some kind of widget to authenticate or verify nft/wallet like collab.land for discord? I'm interested in using the membership areas as a gated community, rather than paid.

Thank you for any help!!

L

Hello, laurelbdesign!

I'm working on a project that makes web3 integration an ease (just did a hackathon in Amsterdam building the tool). It's called EtherForms.

Would love to have your input, and see if I can help you!

We have made a small Discord server for early users, where we gather feedback and discuss while building the tool.

Feel free to join, and I'd do whatever I can to help you 🙂

https://discord.gg/2xxVJgCwyT

Hi, I've joined Open Node and have a button I want to add into my squarespace site from them. I'm trying to work out how I can accept bitcoin. Any suggestions? When I paste in the code, the pay with bitcoin button dosen't show.

Any feedback would be appreciated!

Thanks!

On 3/15/2023 at 12:51 PM, Beautiflora said:

Hi, I've joined Open Node and have a button I want to add into my squarespace site from them. I'm trying to work out how I can accept bitcoin. Any suggestions? When I paste in the code, the pay with bitcoin button dosen't show.

Any feedback would be appreciated!

Thanks!

Which code did you paste? Can you share link to page where you added the code?

On 3/15/2023 at 3:51 PM, Beautiflora said:

Hi, I've joined Open Node and have a button I want to add into my squarespace site from them. I'm trying to work out how I can accept bitcoin. Any suggestions? When I paste in the code, the pay with bitcoin button dosen't show.

Any feedback would be appreciated!

Thanks!

What is the code? I may be able to help