5 ms·

Fyi, I would really like to keep as far away as possible from wordpress. On the other hand, while everyone predicts the death of wordpress, there is still no v

by sharmi 8y ago

Fyi, I would really like to keep as far away as possible from wordpress. On the other hand, while everyone predicts the death of wordpress, there is still no viable alternative. So many projects on Indiehackers start on wordpress still. There is still no customizable, verstaile alternative for wordpress in spite of its many failings. If there is an alternative with an ecosystem as big as wordpress, or atleast has the growth potential to become one, I am very eager to know.

mgkimsal 8y ago
> If there is an alternative with an ecosystem as big as wordpress, or atleast has the growth potential to become one, I am very eager to know. There probably won't be, because it would introduce many of the same problems WP has. If you want an ecommerce platform, there are plenty to choose from. Throwing 'woocommerce' on top of your blog solves some problems, but creates (many) others, and if your focus is ecommerce, use a more focused platform. It's the "it can do everything for all people" aspect which has created some of the problems we see.
- CM30 8y ago
  To be honest, I'd say WooCommerce is probably one of the easiest to use solutions for eCommerce. I mean, Magento is complicated enough that whole companies exist around it and where anything less than a VPS is probably not gonna handle it well, and OpenCart is a bit of a car crash when it comes to figuring out where to get support/decent plugins/documentation. Given those types of alternatives, well, at least WooCommerce is simple enough to pick up for someone who's used WordPress before, and doesn't require learning a whole second overly bloated/complicated CMS system to set up. What is the best solution for a decent shop nowadays? At least if you want to host it yourself and not rely on a service like Shopify?
  - mgkimsal 8y ago
    i briefly inherited a woocommerce system with 62 plugins, and because it was so 'easy', the original devs hadn't bothered with things like child themes or version control or documenting any thing they did or why. The WP ecosystem doesn't easily allow for dev sites / testing, and at least one of the plugins was tied to a domain name and wasn't easy to use on non-prod systems. Paid support from some plugin vendors always ends up with "disable all plugins except ours first and run everything that way before you ask for anything else". "Even the plugins that this one depends on?" I'd ask, to no reply. I understand why, but plugin vendors will point the finger at other plugins - sometimes rightly so - but when so many plugins can change global state all the time, it's a pain to track down what's breaking. Any time I bring experiences like this up, I'm told "no one has 60 plugins, that's horrendous, I'd never have more than 5 plugins on any WP project ever, you should have started over, you're exaggerating" - some combination of those sentiments. There were 62 (or 65) plugins - IIRC somewhere around 10-12 weren't actively used. When I inherit projects, I often argue for greenfield rebuilds with the lessons learned from the previous project. When that goes through, I often hit a valley of "we should have refactored". When starting off on the "refactor" path, I often hit a valley of "this should have been rebuilt". There's often not much way to put good tests around WP stuff to get the confidence and repeatability needed to move forward with large scale customizations. If you start from scratch, have a talented team who understands all aspects of WP development and document things, perhaps it's "good" to start with? If you're selling a handful of items... yeah. If you're happy with existing themes and don't want any substantive behavioural changes to how themes/plugins work, yeah. Use it. When you want custom or large changes to how the $80 theme sellers think you should run an ecommerce store... I wouldn't recommend it, and I don't know what I'd recommend, really. Other options: The Sylius project? Foxycart? Some of the commerce projects I've dealt with are doing hundreds of thousands of dollars, up to millions in sales. They were pushed to woocommerce because 'it's cheap, can do XYZ, no need for "expensive programmers", etc'. You're doing $800k in sales and have no unit tests on the code running your entire operation? On top of that you want changes to fundamental code bits, without easy to setup dev/test/staging/prod workflow or unit tests? Scares the crap out of me. But yeah, I'm not a WP-head, so perhaps you get used to that level of "seat of the pants" working? Or... you spend so much time/effort setting up custom workflow that you can now easily churn out "woocommerce" work with some level of repeatability and confidence? You're probably not on the 'cheap' end, which is often a selling point for WP/woo work. No doubt, I know that the woocommerce base is used on some big projects. I also have to imagine they had larger teams of people doing custom work fulltime for a long period of uninterrupted time. If you have that team and are doing customizations and integrations, you're not in the realm of "I need something simple that's not magento". Ultimately, it depends on your needs and skills. Solo/small team, already 'know' WP with existing skills in that world, use woo - knock yourself out. But don't color too far outside the lines.
    - dwd 8y ago
      This... For a WordPress only site, half a dozen plugins for specific functionality is what I aim for. But WooCommerce, they pile up really quickly just for core requirements like payment gateways, a quickview, wishlist: Things that are core or would be baked into the theme in Magento. 62, wow. I flip out if they had half that. Usually they're running some sort of cruddy backup system, multiple security plugins because they got hacked previously (not surprised) and a dozen plugins that they don't need.
  - dwd 8y ago
    Setting up Magento 2 requires a developer, there's no way around that as you need to do a lot of setup using the cli. WooCommerce on the other hand is all plug and play and easy enough for a lot of shop owners to self-manage. Magento's admin interface is superior and if your catalog is in the order of 100s of thousands of skus, nothing else is going to cut it. But as you said it needs a lot more server to run effectively.
  - mgkimsal 8y ago
    > Magento is complicated enough that whole companies exist around it That's an odd metric. There's loads of companies around wordpress and plenty of companies that focus on woocommerce implementations - that's wholly separate from the complexity of the systems in question.

by sharmi 8y ago

mgkimsal 8y ago

> If there is an alternative with an ecosystem as big as wordpress, or atleast has the growth potential to become one, I am very eager to know. There probably won't be, because it would introduce many of the same problems WP has. If you want an ecommerce platform, there are plenty to choose from. Throwing 'woocommerce' on top of your blog solves some problems, but creates (many) others, and if your focus is ecommerce, use a more focused platform. It's the "it can do everything for all people" aspect which has created some of the problems we see.

CM30 8y ago
To be honest, I'd say WooCommerce is probably one of the easiest to use solutions for eCommerce. I mean, Magento is complicated enough that whole companies exist around it and where anything less than a VPS is probably not gonna handle it well, and OpenCart is a bit of a car crash when it comes to figuring out where to get support/decent plugins/documentation. Given those types of alternatives, well, at least WooCommerce is simple enough to pick up for someone who's used WordPress before, and doesn't require learning a whole second overly bloated/complicated CMS system to set up. What is the best solution for a decent shop nowadays? At least if you want to host it yourself and not rely on a service like Shopify?
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  i briefly inherited a woocommerce system with 62 plugins, and because it was so 'easy', the original devs hadn't bothered with things like child themes or version control or documenting any thing they did or why. The WP ecosystem doesn't easily allow for dev sites / testing, and at least one of the plugins was tied to a domain name and wasn't easy to use on non-prod systems. Paid support from some plugin vendors always ends up with "disable all plugins except ours first and run everything that way before you ask for anything else". "Even the plugins that this one depends on?" I'd ask, to no reply. I understand why, but plugin vendors will point the finger at other plugins - sometimes rightly so - but when so many plugins can change global state all the time, it's a pain to track down what's breaking. Any time I bring experiences like this up, I'm told "no one has 60 plugins, that's horrendous, I'd never have more than 5 plugins on any WP project ever, you should have started over, you're exaggerating" - some combination of those sentiments. There were 62 (or 65) plugins - IIRC somewhere around 10-12 weren't actively used. When I inherit projects, I often argue for greenfield rebuilds with the lessons learned from the previous project. When that goes through, I often hit a valley of "we should have refactored". When starting off on the "refactor" path, I often hit a valley of "this should have been rebuilt". There's often not much way to put good tests around WP stuff to get the confidence and repeatability needed to move forward with large scale customizations. If you start from scratch, have a talented team who understands all aspects of WP development and document things, perhaps it's "good" to start with? If you're selling a handful of items... yeah. If you're happy with existing themes and don't want any substantive behavioural changes to how themes/plugins work, yeah. Use it. When you want custom or large changes to how the $80 theme sellers think you should run an ecommerce store... I wouldn't recommend it, and I don't know what I'd recommend, really. Other options: The Sylius project? Foxycart? Some of the commerce projects I've dealt with are doing hundreds of thousands of dollars, up to millions in sales. They were pushed to woocommerce because 'it's cheap, can do XYZ, no need for "expensive programmers", etc'. You're doing $800k in sales and have no unit tests on the code running your entire operation? On top of that you want changes to fundamental code bits, without easy to setup dev/test/staging/prod workflow or unit tests? Scares the crap out of me. But yeah, I'm not a WP-head, so perhaps you get used to that level of "seat of the pants" working? Or... you spend so much time/effort setting up custom workflow that you can now easily churn out "woocommerce" work with some level of repeatability and confidence? You're probably not on the 'cheap' end, which is often a selling point for WP/woo work. No doubt, I know that the woocommerce base is used on some big projects. I also have to imagine they had larger teams of people doing custom work fulltime for a long period of uninterrupted time. If you have that team and are doing customizations and integrations, you're not in the realm of "I need something simple that's not magento". Ultimately, it depends on your needs and skills. Solo/small team, already 'know' WP with existing skills in that world, use woo - knock yourself out. But don't color too far outside the lines.
  - dwd 8y ago
    This... For a WordPress only site, half a dozen plugins for specific functionality is what I aim for. But WooCommerce, they pile up really quickly just for core requirements like payment gateways, a quickview, wishlist: Things that are core or would be baked into the theme in Magento. 62, wow. I flip out if they had half that. Usually they're running some sort of cruddy backup system, multiple security plugins because they got hacked previously (not surprised) and a dozen plugins that they don't need.
- dwd 8y ago
  Setting up Magento 2 requires a developer, there's no way around that as you need to do a lot of setup using the cli. WooCommerce on the other hand is all plug and play and easy enough for a lot of shop owners to self-manage. Magento's admin interface is superior and if your catalog is in the order of 100s of thousands of skus, nothing else is going to cut it. But as you said it needs a lot more server to run effectively.
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  > Magento is complicated enough that whole companies exist around it That's an odd metric. There's loads of companies around wordpress and plenty of companies that focus on woocommerce implementations - that's wholly separate from the complexity of the systems in question.