[JaggedJax]

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).

[Twirrim]

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.

[chjohasbrouck]

> 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.

[benmarks]

We're nothing if not blessed by a vocal community, many of whom - like Karen - have their livelihoods as well as the livelihoods of employees to look after.

Karen raises some valid points. Others have raised some additional points as well as counterpoints:

* Kalen Jordan (Co-host of MageTalk podcast, MageMail.co creator, CommerceHero.io founder): https://blog.commercehero.io/response-1ee004f6d3c7

* Joshua Warren (CEO of Creatuity, a Magento partner agency): http://www.joshuawarren.com/blog/2017/1/5/magento-2-in-2017-...

* Paul Byrne (President of Razoyo, a non-partner Magento agency): https://www.razoyo.com/blog/2017/01/07/2017-starts-rage-apol...

If anyone reading this thread is curious about Magento in 2017, I recommend to check them out as well.

[navs]

I've had the fortune of meeting Karen, who wrote that blog piece, and know how frustrated she's been.

I work with Magento everyday and what she says of a disparity between community and the enterprise agenda is ever so apparent.

Promises can only take you so far.

[ehnto]

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]

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.

[benmarks]

Curious, where do you suggest they look? FWIW I'm all for getting merchants and their tech teams on the right platform for them - no solution works for everyone.

As for us (Magento): Our velocity in handling GitHub issues and PRs for M2 has been really, really slow. This is partly due to the volume of reports, and partly due to some inefficiency in our own house. We're fortunate that we have a huge, engaged community who have continued to be patient with us - however, we know that patience has worn thin. People have work to do! Merchants have customers to please!

Starting a couple of months ago, the factors around this have started to change for the better. We've dedicated a large portion of our team to working on issue support, and I've been having calls & conversations this week which indicate further shifts for the better.

In the next week or so, I (@benmarks) and/or our new SVP of Product & Technology (Jason Woosley - @jasonwoosley_mg) will post more about the current state as well as upcoming changes.

Hopefully in the future you will be able to recommend Magento 2 when appropriate. Of course, it is on us to demonstrate real improvement.

In the meantime, my inbox is always open: [e-mail]

[Intermernet]

Thanks for the reply Ben.

Regarding your question, I hate to say it, but out of my recommendations most of my clients are tending towards either Woo or Shopify. I actually personally prefer Magento for most reasons, and still have clients who are happily trading with M1, both OS and Enterprise, but the customers on M2 feel that they've been burnt by the constant show-stopper bugs (mostly in regards to integration with other systems).

I really hope that I'll be able to start recommending M2 to clients again, as I've worked with Magento for many years and I know the system well. I feel it gets a lot of things right, but the M2 bugs have been frankly embarrassing, and have led to uncomfortable conversations with clients where I have to explain that yes, the old M1 site worked perfectly, but the new site that they're spending money on still has 3 month old bugs that I can't provide an update on, or even an ETA for resolution.

I look forward to Magento hopefully fixing the major issues with M2 in the near future.

P.S. I realised that I didn't actually post the URL to the bug I mentioned in my previous post. It's https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/6683 ("Products updated_at field is not updating on save") which seems related to a couple of other bugs pertaining to "updated_at" fields not being modified.

[benmarks]

From what I can tell, it's in the high priority backlog. Hopefully that means some progress along with... lots of other things. But, let's wait until we have some demonstrated burn down before we pop champagne.

[jonah]

If you're not tied to PHP, check out Spree[1] or its fork Solidus[2].

[1] https://spreecommerce.com/ [2] http://solidus.io/

[hardwaresofton]

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]

Curious: what do you find missing from WooCommerce?

[themaveness]

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]

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.

[aritali]

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]

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

[themaveness]

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.

[lightedman]

You should worry about it, and fast, as every professional and actually usable and maintainable setup uses one, and your refusal to use one, thus relying upon a patchwork of unknown stuff from unknown sources, is one of your biggest exploitable (as in I do it to clients while testing their network every day,) vulnerabilities.

So far, I've moved a lot of people, including my own online auction company, off of your platform because getting AJAX code to work reliably with it is near impossible due to lack of object-relational mapping.

I could go on and on, but quite frankly, you need to start from scratch. Right now you're just trying to slap a lot of icing on a poorly-made cake.

[sandGorgon]

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]

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.

[sandGorgon]

hmm.. i wont say I'm not disappointed. i thought you guys were going to rewrite a lot of the core because everything is broken anyway.

since 1.7 is already breaking backward compatibility.. maybe it was an opportunity to do it right.

[benmarks]

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]

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]

Okay, I've emailed their team so that they can look into the situation.