Bodholdt Atelier Docs

What Bodholdt Atelier is

Bodholdt Atelier is a full art-business platform for WordPress. It turns your site into a white-label storefront for selling originals, prints, limited editions, commissions, music, photography, and digital downloads. It comes with a collector CRM, certificates of authenticity, patron subscriptions, and gamified studio tools. It is self-hosted and GPL-licensed, so your store, your customers, and your sales data stay on infrastructure you control.

Getting started

1. Install and activate

Upload the plugin ZIP from your WordPress dashboard (Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin), then activate it. The free edition works immediately in community mode with no license key. If you bought a license, paste your key on the Atelier license screen to activate it on this site. Every feature is already present either way.

2. Connect a payment processor

Atelier supports Stripe and PayPal, plus a simulated checkout you can use to test the full buying flow before going live. Add your keys in Atelier → Settings → Payments & Tax. You keep 100% of your sales revenue (minus your payment processor’s own fees), and Atelier never takes a cut.

Add the webhook as well. Live Stripe needs it. In Stripe, open Developers, then Webhooks, and add an endpoint pointing at the Stripe webhook URL shown on your own Payments & Tax screen. It looks like https://your-site.example/wp-json/bodholdt-atelier/v1/stripe-webhook. Subscribe it to three events: checkout.session.completed, invoice.paid and customer.subscription.deleted. Copy the signing secret Stripe gives you into Webhook signing secret, then send a test delivery to confirm it arrives.

Without it, one-time orders still confirm when the buyer returns to your site, but server-to-server events are rejected as unsigned. That means patron subscriptions never renew. Stripe keeps charging the card, no renewal is recorded in Orders, and the patron loses portal and content-drip access about three days after their first period ends.

PayPal has its own endpoint at …/bodholdt-atelier/v1/paypal-webhook and its own PayPal webhook ID field, which starts with WH-. Subscribe it to CHECKOUT.ORDER.APPROVED and PAYMENT.CAPTURE.COMPLETED, which confirm one-time order capture. Patron subscriptions renew through Stripe only.

3. Create your first work

Add a piece from Atelier → Works. Choose a work type (Unique Piece, limited edition, made to order, music, photography, or digital download), set pricing and inventory, and upload your files. Limited editions track the edition size and mark pieces as available, limited, or sold automatically.

Your white-label storefront

Under Settings → Storefront appearance you control the look with a live preview: upload your logo, set a single accent color, choose Light, Dark, or Auto, and pick a corner style. Atelier ships with clean, neutral defaults rather than a fixed theme, and derives readable hover and contrast shades automatically. Availability colors (available, sold, limited) keep their meaning across themes.

Protecting and authenticating your work

• Certificates of authenticity with full provenance are issued for eligible sales.
• Per-buyer watermarking and signed, expiring download links protect digital files after purchase.
• EU VAT and IOSS handling is included, but it is off by default: switch it on under Settings → Payments & Tax before you sell cross-border.

Collectors and recurring revenue

The built-in collector CRM keeps a record of who bought what. You can go beyond one-off sales with patron subscriptions and content drip, and take commissions with milestone payments and booking. Both are in every copy of Atelier.

Growing beyond a solo studio

Atelier also includes Foundry (run a multi-artist collective with Stripe Connect payouts and a leaderboard), a cross-artist Marketplace for discovery, and the Publish API with its Adobe Lightroom plugin. None of them needs a license.

Every screen Atelier adds

Atelier puts one Atelier item in your WordPress menu. Everything lives under it:

• Dashboard is the overview you land on.
• Works is everything you sell. This is where you spend most of your time.
• Orders is what people have bought.
• CRM is your collectors, with what each of them owns.
• Shows is exhibitions and events.
• Consignments is work placed with a gallery or shop.
• Fulfillments is what still has to be packed and posted.
• Affiliates is people who send you buyers.
• Subscribers is your mailing list.
• Trophy Case and Setup Quest are the game layer. Setup Quest walks you through the steps below and marks off what you have already done. One caution while we ship a fix: its checkout step writes the simulated payment mode even when Stripe or PayPal is already configured, so if your storefront is live, skip that one step and set your payment mode in Settings → Payments & Tax instead.
• Settings and License are the last two.

Three more screens sit alongside those: Commissions and Bookings after CRM, and Patrons after Consignments. They are present whether or not you hold a license.

The thirteen kinds of work

When you add a work, you pick what kind it is. Each kind changes what the buyer sees and what happens after they pay:

• Unique Piece, for one original that sells once.
• Limited Edition, numbered, with the edition size shown and counted down.
• Made to Order, produced after the sale.
• Digital Download, delivered as a signed link that expires.
• Music Release, for tracks and albums.
• Photograph, including print sizes.
• Client Gallery, a private set for one client.
• Commission Slot, a place in your queue.
• Patronage Tier, a recurring subscription.
• Webcomic / Serial, released in parts.
• Video / Course.
• Bundle, several works sold together.
• Tip / Pay-What-You-Want, where the buyer sets the price.

Putting your storefront on a page

Atelier does not take over your site. You place it where you want it, with four shortcodes:

• [bodholdt_atelier] is the storefront itself. Put it on a page called Shop, Store, Work, or whatever you call it.
• [bodholdt_atelier_artists] lists the artists in a multi-artist studio.
• [bodholdt_atelier_book] shows your booking calendar.
• [bodholdt_atelier_subscribe] is the sign-up form for your mailing list.

A page with only [bodholdt_atelier] on it is a complete storefront. Everything else is optional.

The Settings screen

Atelier → Settings is split into six tabs, each with its own Save button, so saving one tab never touches another:

• Studio is your name, your currency, and how the storefront presents itself.
• Payments & Tax is Stripe, PayPal, and EU VAT and IOSS handling.
• Shipping & Fulfillment is postage, and print-on-demand if you use it.
• Marketing is your mailing list and the subscribe form.
• Integrations is everything outside Atelier, including the Lightroom publish route.
• Game Feel turns the studio game layer up or down, or off.

When something is not right

• The storefront page is blank. The page needs the [bodholdt_atelier] shortcode on it. A page with no shortcode renders nothing, because Atelier does not guess which page is your shop.
• Checkout does not appear. Connect Stripe or PayPal under Atelier → Settings → Payments & Tax first. Until one is connected there is nothing to check out with.
• A download link stopped working. That is deliberate. Download links are signed and expire, so a link that has been passed around stops working. The buyer can get a fresh one.
• Commissions, Bookings or Patrons are missing from the menu. They do not need a license, so this is a fault rather than a limit. Update to the current version, and if they are still missing, get in touch.
• A limited edition still shows as available after it sold out. Check the edition size on the work itself. Atelier counts down from the number you set there.

Need help?

Open a ticket on our Support page. Paid licenses include email support while active, and a lifetime license has no renewal date, so its support does not stop at one.