Hi everyone, hello @datakick, @Smile and @Acer
My premium membership just expired, which felt like the right moment to pause and reflect on the current state of the project.
I’ve been here since day one and truly appreciate everything achieved over the years. thirty bees has been a solid foundation for a long time, but I am seriously concerned about its future. Official commits on GitHub have become rare; while community PRs are still coming in, they often seem to go unnoticed. There is a lack of transparent communication regarding the roadmap.
This leads me to a point where I have to ask: Is it still worth building on the thirty bees core, or is the project effectively dead as an open-source endeavor?
Technical Hurdles and Workarounds In my daily work, legacy issues in the core are slowing me down significantly. Address handling is cluttered, and features like multishipping (used by maybe 5% of merchants) make the code unnecessarily complex and bug-prone. A prime example is the "splitting order" issue that hits me every few months—a bug known in the PrestaShop community for 15 years.
To keep the system extendable, I’ve developed a "best practice" over the last few months using classes like OrderDetailExtension or ProductExtension that share the ID key to manage new columns. It works, but it’s a lot of overhead that only makes sense if maintaining backward compatibility with the core actually provides long-term value. If the project is stagnating, it would be more efficient for me to drop compatibility and modify core files directly.
Waiting for Features Over a year ago, I had an intensive talk with Petr about a credit system for customers. Since I need exactly that, I waited—but I’m still standing here without a solution. In recent weeks, I haven't been able to reach Petr at all. While there was a recent sign of life on GitHub, it’s not enough for professional planning.
I would love to see a Version 2.0 that modernizes the system radically:
A rigorous code rewrite (even if it breaks old modules).
Support only for currently supported PHP versions and updates for components like Smarty.
A Backoffice designed around merchant needs, not just a collection of controllers.
Clean Code as AI Foundation: clean, unambiguous codebase is essential today. If the core is logically structured, any AI can easily generate high-quality modules. If the base is "spaghetti," the AI will only produce more spaghetti code.
Conclusion Is this vision of a Version 2.0 shared by the team, and is it something being actively worked towards? If not, that is perfectly fine. But then I have reached the point where I will likely move in this direction alone and radically decouple my own codebase from the core.
Best Regards
Emanuel