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I had high hopes for PrestaShop and hope this leads to the improvements the platform needs. It's so close to being great but it was not particularly stable and

I had high hopes for PrestaShop and hope this leads to the improvements the platform needs. It's so close to being great but it was not particularly stable and their API is a terrible mess of an afterthought. I hope they can turn this into a stable and powerful platform that I can recommend as a self-hosted solution over Magento (too bloated) and WooCommerce (easy to use, but tied to Wordpress and missing some important features).

aritali 10y ago
I have been helping with the fork, that is the plan. First thing we have to stabilize it and fix the bugs. We are refactoring a paypal module right now that has buttons that are not connecting to anything. It calls methods that do not exist. It was something that someone made to essentially try to get over on people. Once we get things stabilized we are going to figure out the best way to rewrite things. That is why we are trying to be very community focused. We need to see the pain points of merchants, what they want, what would make them succeed. We are scrubbing the whole platform for legacy code and updating what we can while maintaining compatibility with the current modules and themes. Then we are really going to break this down and develop something more awesome than awesome.
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  please please use an ORM. if yoy dont build database abstraction today... you will never be able to build it once the plugins take off. Just the fact that you can run postgresql will be a killer feature. i think the golden usecase would be running thirtybees on heroku (postgresql, composer, php 7) EDIT: there was a dead comment about how postgresql is not good. what im asking is different - im requesting for an ORM like Doctrine or Propel. This will let the end user choose the database that they want to use. But you have to take this stand pretty early in a project's life cycle or you will not be able to do it later. Exactly the issue with WordPress. http://www.doctrine-project.org http://www.doctrine-project.org http://propelorm.org http://propelorm.org
  - aritali 10y ago
    To be totally honest these are the kind of decisions that kill a platform like this. Postgres is great and everything, but the low number of hosts that adopt it would sink something like this. You really have to look at the market. The main installation user will be using softaculous or a similar installer on cpanel. Which does not support Postgres out of the box. Sure, if you have root you can add it, but that will effectively kill our US shared hosting / managed VPS market. The goal is to make it where merchants can use the software easily and it has features they want. Picking a Postgres design effectively limits us in using compatible modules out of the box and it effectively limits our hosting choices. I don't think its anything we are going to do at the start, but I would not rule out a version of it in the future.
  - themaveness 10y ago
    I get it, but honestly it is not in the immediate roadmap. Its really not something that people in the scale we are in are worried with.
    - sandGorgon 10y ago
      an ORM will help you write more maintainable code in general. Every framework right from rails to symfony uses an ORM for the abstraction it brings. Some of the security issues in wordpress - unescaped queries, SQL injection and everything - which plagued it for decades could have been avoided by using a well tested ORM. I would urge you to make this one of the highest priorities in your code cleanup. It is not going to take you a lot of effort, but the long term advantages are too many to enumerate here. For example, for your own development sake - I dont know how you plan to manage schema changes. If you use Propel, you will use "database migrations" - something that every framework from Rails to Django, etc mandates as best practice.
      - themaveness 10y ago
        I understand it, but look at it from this point of view. PrestaShop 1.7 requires everyone to purchase new themes and modules. The code base is extremely messed up. We are taking the PrestaShop 1.6 codebase that has 10k modules and 2k themes as a fork. If we go changing the database handling off the bat we are going to lose the compatibility that might make us successful. We aren't a project starting from scratch with unencumbered code. We need to maintain compatibility to be successful in the beginning. We are springboarding basically. You are wanting us to take the springboard away and just jump.
- benmarks 10y ago
  I deal with the PayPal team regularly, and I'm sure they'd be interested in your success. Are you in/near Paris? We (Magento) have an event there in early February. Happy to meet up then or sometime / somewhere.
  - themaveness 10y ago
    We are not. We are actually spread out all around the world. Right now we are not a company, we are just agencies / developers that mad, sick and tired, and want something better. We just started this project this week and we are pulling more and more agencies on board, it is exploding under us. About the Paypal. For me personally that is a reason we are forking. Last year the company that develops the Paypal module for PrestaShop got into an affiliate fee dispute with Paypal. They released an "update" of the Paypal module that basically made every UK shop's module disappear on the checkout for customer. People in the UK had a shit fit. I mean who releases an updated module that is meant to punish users to prove a point to Paypal? Totally unacceptable.
    - benmarks 10y ago
      Okay, I've emailed their team so that they can look into the situation.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jonah 10y ago
If you're not tied to PHP, check out Spree[1] or its fork Solidus[2]. [1] https://spreecommerce.com/ https://spreecommerce.com/ [2] http://solidus.io/ http://solidus.io/
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- hardwaresofton 10y ago
  Why are they both built on rails? I'm a little intimidated by the fact that if I have a problem with my store front, and start to look under the covers to fix things, I'd be hit with the full complexity of entering a new rails codebase.
rmccue 10y ago
Curious: what do you find missing from WooCommerce?
- themaveness 10y ago
  I find it missing a lot of things personally. Its just a mash of plugins from different sources that have not been evaluated or secured. The package itself is pretty light, because it does not have the features of other actual ecommerce packages. You have to use plugins that were not made for ecommerce packages to extend it. A good case in point is most dedicated ecommerce platforms have one thing in common. User login and admin login is handled by a totally different system. This is a security feature. At the same time, most platforms support multiple sites or shops out of the box. Woo supports it with a plugin that was never made for ecommerce. The lack of an MVC ... I digress. Wordpress is awesome for blogs. For something that takes money and has liability I don't want to have to read 0-day lists every day and see if I need to comment out something or update. Its counter productive to business.
- Implicated 10y ago
  I don't have the time or energy to list all of my issues with WooCommerce, but as a PHP contractor that has worked on a handful of client projects utilizing it... I could never recommend it to people trying to run a real business. The fact that it will turn off webhook delivery after 5 un-expected responses, without sending notifications of any sort, is mind boggling.
Twirrim 10y ago
Urgh. It has been several years now since I last had to deal with Magento, and nothing I've seen over the years suggests it has got any better. At the time, the final product was arguably a case of code that is far too split up, resulting in quite some system penalties. I get the advantage of developing that way, but I wonder if they'd have been served better by somehow writing stuff to combine libraries together for the final releases product. Even loading the landing page on a default website used to require loading hundreds of PHP scripts. I was absolutely gobsmacked the metrics I was getting out of APC.
- ehnto 10y ago
  There is a completely re-written Magento 2 out now, in case you were curious. I have high hopes for it's future as it has some great minds behind it, but unfortunately at the moment it has some very key usability issues for developers and they are still making grand architectural changes to some components in a not so friendly fashion, so it is hard to iron those issues out yourself. It is still an incredibly complex and cumbersome beast, and I suspect that will never change. But for complex and cumbersome business requirements it's strict structure and modularity make it a good fit. It also has the benefit of being one of the few module/plugin ecosystems where it isn't a race to the bottom, as good idiomatic plugins are hard enough to build that it keeps lowballers uninterested and bad modules will fail a sniff test pretty quickly. Source: Full time Magento dev.
  - Intermernet 10y ago
    Magento have had a bug in 2.1 Since September last year which they still don't seem to have fixed which basically breaks any 3rd party import / export / sync[1]. Not only that, but it was assigned an "internal jira ticket" near the end of October and there hasn't been any further notification since. This isn't an isolated incident. They spend a lot of money on marketing and conferences, yet the developer community seem to get less feedback than a one-person open-source labor-of-love provides. It's obvious (and has been for years) that Magento are really about the Enterprise version, and the Open Source version is really just a tip of the hat to their original legacy. I still do consultation for it, but I no longer recommend it. I actually now actively suggest that people looking for ecommerce solutions look elsewhere.

aritali 10y ago

I have been helping with the fork, that is the plan. First thing we have to stabilize it and fix the bugs. We are refactoring a paypal module right now that has buttons that are not connecting to anything. It calls methods that do not exist. It was something that someone made to essentially try to get over on people. Once we get things stabilized we are going to figure out the best way to rewrite things. That is why we are trying to be very community focused. We need to see the pain points of merchants, what they want, what would make them succeed. We are scrubbing the whole platform for legacy code and updating what we can while maintaining compatibility with the current modules and themes. Then we are really going to break this down and develop something more awesome than awesome.

sandGorgon 10y ago
please please use an ORM. if yoy dont build database abstraction today... you will never be able to build it once the plugins take off. Just the fact that you can run postgresql will be a killer feature. i think the golden usecase would be running thirtybees on heroku (postgresql, composer, php 7) EDIT: there was a dead comment about how postgresql is not good. what im asking is different - im requesting for an ORM like Doctrine or Propel. This will let the end user choose the database that they want to use. But you have to take this stand pretty early in a project's life cycle or you will not be able to do it later. Exactly the issue with WordPress. http://www.doctrine-project.org http://www.doctrine-project.org http://propelorm.org http://propelorm.org
- aritali 10y ago
  To be totally honest these are the kind of decisions that kill a platform like this. Postgres is great and everything, but the low number of hosts that adopt it would sink something like this. You really have to look at the market. The main installation user will be using softaculous or a similar installer on cpanel. Which does not support Postgres out of the box. Sure, if you have root you can add it, but that will effectively kill our US shared hosting / managed VPS market. The goal is to make it where merchants can use the software easily and it has features they want. Picking a Postgres design effectively limits us in using compatible modules out of the box and it effectively limits our hosting choices. I don't think its anything we are going to do at the start, but I would not rule out a version of it in the future.
- themaveness 10y ago
  I get it, but honestly it is not in the immediate roadmap. Its really not something that people in the scale we are in are worried with.
  - sandGorgon 10y ago
    an ORM will help you write more maintainable code in general. Every framework right from rails to symfony uses an ORM for the abstraction it brings. Some of the security issues in wordpress - unescaped queries, SQL injection and everything - which plagued it for decades could have been avoided by using a well tested ORM. I would urge you to make this one of the highest priorities in your code cleanup. It is not going to take you a lot of effort, but the long term advantages are too many to enumerate here. For example, for your own development sake - I dont know how you plan to manage schema changes. If you use Propel, you will use "database migrations" - something that every framework from Rails to Django, etc mandates as best practice.
    - themaveness 10y ago
      I understand it, but look at it from this point of view. PrestaShop 1.7 requires everyone to purchase new themes and modules. The code base is extremely messed up. We are taking the PrestaShop 1.6 codebase that has 10k modules and 2k themes as a fork. If we go changing the database handling off the bat we are going to lose the compatibility that might make us successful. We aren't a project starting from scratch with unencumbered code. We need to maintain compatibility to be successful in the beginning. We are springboarding basically. You are wanting us to take the springboard away and just jump.
benmarks 10y ago
I deal with the PayPal team regularly, and I'm sure they'd be interested in your success. Are you in/near Paris? We (Magento) have an event there in early February. Happy to meet up then or sometime / somewhere.
- themaveness 10y ago
  We are not. We are actually spread out all around the world. Right now we are not a company, we are just agencies / developers that mad, sick and tired, and want something better. We just started this project this week and we are pulling more and more agencies on board, it is exploding under us. About the Paypal. For me personally that is a reason we are forking. Last year the company that develops the Paypal module for PrestaShop got into an affiliate fee dispute with Paypal. They released an "update" of the Paypal module that basically made every UK shop's module disappear on the checkout for customer. People in the UK had a shit fit. I mean who releases an updated module that is meant to punish users to prove a point to Paypal? Totally unacceptable.
  - benmarks 10y ago
    Okay, I've emailed their team so that they can look into the situation.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jonah 10y ago

If you're not tied to PHP, check out Spree[1] or its fork Solidus[2]. [1] https://spreecommerce.com/ https://spreecommerce.com/ [2] http://solidus.io/ http://solidus.io/

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hardwaresofton 10y ago
Why are they both built on rails? I'm a little intimidated by the fact that if I have a problem with my store front, and start to look under the covers to fix things, I'd be hit with the full complexity of entering a new rails codebase.

rmccue 10y ago

Curious: what do you find missing from WooCommerce?

themaveness 10y ago
I find it missing a lot of things personally. Its just a mash of plugins from different sources that have not been evaluated or secured. The package itself is pretty light, because it does not have the features of other actual ecommerce packages. You have to use plugins that were not made for ecommerce packages to extend it. A good case in point is most dedicated ecommerce platforms have one thing in common. User login and admin login is handled by a totally different system. This is a security feature. At the same time, most platforms support multiple sites or shops out of the box. Woo supports it with a plugin that was never made for ecommerce. The lack of an MVC ... I digress. Wordpress is awesome for blogs. For something that takes money and has liability I don't want to have to read 0-day lists every day and see if I need to comment out something or update. Its counter productive to business.
Implicated 10y ago
I don't have the time or energy to list all of my issues with WooCommerce, but as a PHP contractor that has worked on a handful of client projects utilizing it... I could never recommend it to people trying to run a real business. The fact that it will turn off webhook delivery after 5 un-expected responses, without sending notifications of any sort, is mind boggling.

Twirrim 10y ago

Urgh. It has been several years now since I last had to deal with Magento, and nothing I've seen over the years suggests it has got any better. At the time, the final product was arguably a case of code that is far too split up, resulting in quite some system penalties. I get the advantage of developing that way, but I wonder if they'd have been served better by somehow writing stuff to combine libraries together for the final releases product. Even loading the landing page on a default website used to require loading hundreds of PHP scripts. I was absolutely gobsmacked the metrics I was getting out of APC.

ehnto 10y ago
There is a completely re-written Magento 2 out now, in case you were curious. I have high hopes for it's future as it has some great minds behind it, but unfortunately at the moment it has some very key usability issues for developers and they are still making grand architectural changes to some components in a not so friendly fashion, so it is hard to iron those issues out yourself. It is still an incredibly complex and cumbersome beast, and I suspect that will never change. But for complex and cumbersome business requirements it's strict structure and modularity make it a good fit. It also has the benefit of being one of the few module/plugin ecosystems where it isn't a race to the bottom, as good idiomatic plugins are hard enough to build that it keeps lowballers uninterested and bad modules will fail a sniff test pretty quickly. Source: Full time Magento dev.
- Intermernet 10y ago
  Magento have had a bug in 2.1 Since September last year which they still don't seem to have fixed which basically breaks any 3rd party import / export / sync[1]. Not only that, but it was assigned an "internal jira ticket" near the end of October and there hasn't been any further notification since. This isn't an isolated incident. They spend a lot of money on marketing and conferences, yet the developer community seem to get less feedback than a one-person open-source labor-of-love provides. It's obvious (and has been for years) that Magento are really about the Enterprise version, and the Open Source version is really just a tip of the hat to their original legacy. I still do consultation for it, but I no longer recommend it. I actually now actively suggest that people looking for ecommerce solutions look elsewhere.