DavidP

@NorwegianRat It's SagePay we use, which is a UK based one. A lot of small companies use that in the UK as it's not as restrictive as Stripe and not as cumbersome as WorldPay. It just seems it's not well support by the module developers. There's also a problem with it not working with php 7.1+ due to the use of mcryptencrypt instead of openssl_encrypt.

I use it on one of my Prestashop shops and it's not very good. However, I spent ages looking for an alternative and unfortunately there isn't better out there to suits us for the UK. I did look at the Brazilian one (PresTeamShop I think) but it didn't support our payment gateway, which was a shame as it's meant to be the best. We had a lot of trouble with the module not working with our store and had to give them access to fix incompatibilities (the only other module we had installed was the JPresta page cache) but they sorted it out eventually. I did however have to provide lots of detailed examples explaining the problems with screen grabs. We still get lots of problems on the checkout with 'technical errors', which come from the user changing the quantity in the cart - it seems the module really struggles with people removing products, changing their quantity when auto-cart rules come into affect and entering quantities directly into the box. There's a delay in it processing and unfortunately customers can be impatient, which causes it to crash if they're too quick. If I didn't need our payment gateway support I'd jump ship from them.

I use the Knowband on one of my stores. I initially had a number of problems with it that took a couple of months to resolve, it ended up with having to give them access to patch it and those updates made it into a later update. At first they tried to charge me for their time to fix the issues but eventually they backed down and fixed them. The main issue was it didn't work with the 'move javascript to the end' and it had a number of timing issues. I'd say the checkout itself is quite good, though I've had to put in a couple of frigs myself in relation to default states/cities as I have variable shipping prices depending upon location. However, I'd say their support is 'cowboy' level as I've seen with a number of module developers. Saying that, I've been using it since then with no problems. That Presteam one sounds interesting, might have to take a look at that. When I bought the knowband I think it was the best available at the time.

A release creates a defined point in space that can be evaluated & tested on it's own merits, going with the latest version from GIT hub means introducing potential issues on previously tested sections of the code unless each submitted new bit of code has regression testing performed before it's allowed on the main branch. OpenCart suffers massively from this with most problems caused by bugfixes elsewhere. Even creating milestones in GIT hub to signify a release point in time that's been fully tested would allow people to grab versions that should work in an ideal scenario, without the need to work on the autoupdater. With regards to the 805 updates, the 1.04 on GIT has 13 open and 2 closed items, not 805, is there documentation & tests available for those 805 changes? I think the problem though for a lot of people is that TB is going down the route of developer orientated whereas some people coming from PS tend to be business / shop orientated with a lack of developer skills. They don't want to risk breaking their store with myriad changes, they just want the latest version that works and from the click of a button. Those type of shop owners will most likely stick with PS (even though it does tend to break stuff anyhow) because it gives them the safest route to keep their shop making money in their mind.

You're going to run into a wall when you try to have products that are free shipping and not free shipping in the same cart. There's no XOR type logic to knock out one rule in favour of the other, other than setting rules as incompatible with each other. It get much worse when you get into the realms of reduced shipping costs. The PrestaShop core cart/shipping rules are rubbish tbh. You need the ability to apply conditional logic to the rules.

@norwegian_rat I think a lot of people are 'letting their store be' because for many that chose PrestaShop there's no clear safe alternative that offers the same capabilities and they don't want to gamble their business on something that has too many risks associated with it. If there was a platform out there as good as PrestaShop 1.6 that didn't bring a lot of unknown issues along with it then I and many others would have switched last year. The closest alternative is OpenCart but that's really a hackathon with 1.5.4 being the most stable and 2.0 & 3.0 plagued with myriad problems, it's not something you'd switch to from PS 1.6 if you've got any sense.

Non-techie people don't tend to use the likes of slack and gitter and rely on forum updates / blog posts, a lot only work off the version released on Softalicious etc and only find the forums when they run into problems (unless they just give up). TBH I didn't even know TB had a gitter or slack channel, maybe I missed those posts! It does seem like TB is going down the route of dev orientated rather than business user, especially given the activity there. A few other ecommerce platforms I'm watching are also similar with most the activity on those chat boards and not on their forums. A fortnightly update from those channels of issues fixed / raised and stuff from github would appease a lot of people here that think TB has stalled. Something similar to build.prestashop with their weekly code updates might work.

@mdekker Sorry I can't give you the test keys as you'd need access to our merchant account as well, which I'm not allowed to provide. SagePay are very helpful if you've got a merchant account but when it comes to non-merchants they can be somewhat lacking :/

@mockob 1.0.4 has been delayed a bit as they're concentrating on the GDPR, I've just had an email with a blog about it: https://thirtybees.com/blog/thirty-bees-and-gdpr/

I'd not recommend this as your database can quickly become massive. Magento 1 has this sort of thing in place and I've seen sites with over 20,000 records for re-directs in it as even slight changes to the url / structure creates new re-directs. You can end up in the situation with redirect -> redirect -> redirect ... etc in a long chain, which is very bad for Google. Best way to do it is 301 any that are linked to via .htaccess (if you can't get the original source changed) and re-submit the new url through Google Console. Try to get Google to re-index the new url, it usually sorts itself out within a month. Most of your urls won't be linked to unless your site is very old so re-submitting through Google Console for the new url is a better method.

@lesley you might want to make the donate button change when you hover over it so people know it can be clicked.

@mockob Google has recently pushed out an update to the Search Console, which is in Beta. If you go to the Index Coverage page under Status then click the valid tab it shows you links that are submitted and indexed. If you then click that link it'll show all of your urls, from there you can click the download button and get the complete list in a csv file. It also shows you when the page was last crawled. If you've not already been sent an email from Google for it then just search for Google Search Console beta and login from there.

@alwayspaws whilst it's good at looking at competitor on-site SEO, it can't tell you about backlinks. Also the price of it is a one year licence, after that it expires and you need to re-new it. I'd suggest sticking with the free 500 url version and just running that on some competitor sites, it's enough to hit most of the comparable competitors to you. I'd also highly recommend SemRush, it's very expensive but you get 5 free uses a day though this shows only 5 to 10 bits of info but it's free and you can sort it to view the data differently. It's worth paying for a one month go at this at $99.95 and just spidering the hell out of your top 5 competitors and putting it all in a spreadsheet - it gives you a good snapshot of where you stand with them and most importantly, what information you need to steal from them :) Obviously SEO changes constantly but a 1 month go will give you a lot to get your own website in order.

@alwayspaws you can export your urls from the Google Search Console, it's got every indexed page there, just go onto the indexed page section and download them. Screaming Frog is a fantastic tool but it's really more suited in that scenario to downloading competitor urls, for your own the search console is the best bet. I know you can use the sitemap as well but the Search Console is better as it shows you what's actually indexed, rather than just submitted.

@lesley I'd like to see a donation button on the site as well such as via PayPal. My company (and myself) are old school in that we hate to have recurring subscription costs going on but are willing to donate to the project, especially given the whole security issues with card details stored around the web and the amount of hacks that are ongoing. I know it's paranoia but a lot of people are paranoid about their data, that's part of the reason for the GDPR in the first place. I honestly believe that if you asked someone to pay $1 a month to Patreon they'd say no but if you asked them to donate $50 then there's a much higher chance of that happening because there's very little information stored about them in the latter case.