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Connecting ONYX Thrive to your web-to-print store

How an online order becomes a file in your ONYX RIP queue - what connects to what, and what you have to set up once.

Most sign shops already have the hard part working. ONYX is dialled in, the media profiles are right, the QuickSets have been tuned over years. What's missing is the boring bit in the middle: somebody has to take the customer's file, name it correctly, and drop it in the right place.

That's the job this connection removes.

What the chain actually looks like

A customer orders on your store. Once the proof is approved, the print file lands in the ONYX hot folder for the correct media - with no one walking a file to the print station.

From online order to RIP queue An order and approved proof in ShopFoundry pass a print file to Print Bridge running in your shop, which drops it into the ONYX hot folder for the pinned QuickSet, where RIP-Queue picks it up and prints. SHOPFOUNDRY - CLOUD Order placed store or email Proof approved by the customer Print file built named for its QuickSet over HTTPS YOUR SHOP - ON SITE Print Bridge runs on a shop PC Hot folder one per QuickSet RIP-Queue settings applied → printed
Approved work crosses once, into the hot folder ONYX already made for that QuickSet.

Notice what isn't in that diagram: ShopFoundry never talks to your printer, never holds a media profile, and never decides how something prints. ONYX still owns all of that. The connection just delivers a correctly named file to the right folder.

QuickSets, if you're newer to ONYX

A QuickSet is a saved bundle of print settings in RIP-Queue - media, print mode, resolution, cut settings, everything you'd otherwise pick by hand for a job. Once you've built one for, say, 4mm Coroplast, you never set those options again; you just choose the QuickSet.

The part that makes automation possible is this:

Every QuickSet you create gets its own hot folder automatically, and RIP-Queue shares that folder on the network for you. Drop a file in, and RIP-Queue moves it out, applies the QuickSet's settings, and processes it.

So the hot folders you need already exist. You don't build them, and you don't share them by hand. If you have twelve QuickSets, you have twelve hot folders waiting.

The one thing you set up per product

Here's the piece most people expect to be complicated: each product in your store is pinned to a QuickSet. That pin is the whole routing decision.

  • Coroplast Yard Sign → pinned to your FLATBED Coroplast QuickSet
  • Alupanel Sign → pinned to your alupanel QuickSet
  • Vehicle Decal → pinned to whichever contour-cut QuickSet you use

When a proof for a Coroplast job is approved, ShopFoundry builds the print file, names it for that QuickSet, and Print Bridge drops it into that QuickSet's hot folder. The job arrives in RIP-Queue with your settings already applied, because they're the QuickSet's settings - the ones you tuned years ago.

Pin it once per product. Every future order of that product routes itself.

What you actually have to do

The full setup is one afternoon, most of which is checking rather than configuring:

  1. Install Print Bridge on a shop PC that can see the ONYX machine. It needs no inbound ports - it reaches out to ShopFoundry, so there's nothing to open on your firewall.
  2. Point it at your watch folder root - one path, once. ONYX lays its hot folders out predictably underneath, so ShopFoundry works out every QuickSet's folder from that single setting instead of you typing twelve paths.
  3. Let it discover your QuickSets. ShopFoundry reads the list from ONYX and shows you what it found.
  4. Pin each product to a QuickSet from that discovered list - a dropdown, not a path.
  5. Run one real job end to end before you trust it with a customer's.

That's it. No plugin inside ONYX, no changes to your media profiles, no new naming scheme for your operators to learn.

What this is worth

The saving isn't the thirty seconds of dragging a file. It's everything around it: the file that got dropped in the wrong folder and printed on the wrong media, the job that sat in someone's downloads folder over a weekend, the reprint because the wrong revision went out, and the fact that only two people in the shop actually know which QuickSet a given product should use.

Pinning that knowledge to the product means it survives someone being off sick.

Before you start

Two honest prerequisites:

  • Your QuickSets need to be in good order. If your naming is inconsistent, fix it before connecting rather than after - names carry meaning here, and a stray word can send a job to the wrong media.
  • RIP-Queue has to be running for hot folders to be watched. That's an ONYX behaviour, not ours; a file dropped while RIP-Queue is closed simply waits.

Next: the full technical setup - QuickSet naming rules, Windows share permissions, service accounts, discovery, and troubleshooting - is in Setting up ONYX QuickSets for Print Bridge, which opens inside your shop's portal.