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Show HN: Thirty Bees – A PrestaShop 1.6 fork

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Re: Show HN: Thirty Bees – A PrestaShop 1.6 fork

#11

Post by sandGorgon »

aritali wrote: post #4
JaggedJax wrote: post #3

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 import…

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…

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://propelorm.org

Re: Show HN: Thirty Bees – A PrestaShop 1.6 fork

#12

Post by themaveness »

rmccue wrote: post #9
JaggedJax wrote: post #3

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 import…

Curious: what do you find missing from WooCommerce?

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.

Re: Show HN: Thirty Bees – A PrestaShop 1.6 fork

#13

Post by aritali »

sandGorgon wrote: post #11
aritali wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 l…

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.

Re: Show HN: Thirty Bees – A PrestaShop 1.6 fork

#14

Post by benmarks »

aritali wrote: post #4
JaggedJax wrote: post #3

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 import…

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…

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.

Re: Show HN: Thirty Bees – A PrestaShop 1.6 fork

#15

Post by themaveness »

benmarks wrote: post #14
aritali wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Show HN: Thirty Bees – A PrestaShop 1.6 fork

#16

Post by ehnto »

Twirrim wrote: post #10
JaggedJax wrote: post #3

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 import…

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…

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.

Re: Show HN: Thirty Bees – A PrestaShop 1.6 fork

#17

Post by themaveness »

sandGorgon wrote: post #11
aritali wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 l…

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.

Re: Show HN: Thirty Bees – A PrestaShop 1.6 fork

#18

Post by Implicated »

rmccue wrote: post #9
JaggedJax wrote: post #3

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 import…

Curious: what do you find missing from WooCommerce?

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.

Re: Show HN: Thirty Bees – A PrestaShop 1.6 fork

#19

Post by chjohasbrouck »

Twirrim wrote: post #10
JaggedJax wrote: post #3

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 import…

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…

> 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.

One of their biggest vendors, WebShopApps, happened to write a pretty scathing open letter to Magento yesterday if you're interested:

http://webshopapps.com/blog/2017/01/what-magento-should-spen...

This is a company that just a year ago was making almost all of its revenue off of the Magento platform, and they are one of the most-respected brands in that community. Not a good sign for Magento.

Re: Show HN: Thirty Bees – A PrestaShop 1.6 fork

#20

Post by sandGorgon »

themaveness wrote: post #17
sandGorgon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

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.

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.

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