Traumflug

By profession I'm more a server admin and embedded developer, so please bear with my ignorance. Nevertheless I currently have a PS 1.7 shop almost ready for production. What I miss in pretty much any shop software is a safe way to handle maintenance. A way to deal with upgrades, patches, code improvements, without interrupting services to the customer. It looks much like every merchant just tweaks the running shop and hopes the best s/he makes no mistake. No strategy other than quickly reverting wrongdoings or, if things go really wrong, take the shop down to recover from a backup. 30B's stated goal is even to allow code editing from backoffice, surgery on the open, beating heart! As server admin I've learned that one shouldn't do such things unless one doesn't care about customer experience or enjoys to live on the dangerous side. The safe way is to do maintenance offline. On the public web server in a separate installation or on a local installation on the developer's machine. Then to test, test, test. Only after tests were satisfying, development code is synchronized with the public server. This is safe and comes with a minimum of downtime, which means a minimum of customer disruption. However, and this is the reason of this post, this requires a way to clone or synchronize a shop. Rsync shop-here to shop-there with the confidence that the copy works the same way as the origin. AFAIK, PrestaShop doesn't allow such a strategy. Server name is stored in the database, so one has to tweak that manually after an upload. Even installation location on the server is stored somewhere, one can't move a shop from one folder to another without breaking it. Wether a module is present or not isn't determined by looking at files, but by looking at some DB entry, making things inconsistent when one just removes or adds module files. Are there ThirtyBees plans to improve this situation? For PS I made a couple of patches which resolve most issues for monoshops (multishops are more complex). Are such improvements welcome? What do others think?

@mdekker said in German support for thirty bees: You say that sites can be scanned with automated scripts. Do you happen to know one for sites based on PrestaShop/thirty bees? Sorry, no, never been in that business. It's also more a guess. If I'd try to, I'd simply google for shops selling products similar to mine. Most items can be found pretty easily if you know what has to be there: imprint, revocation terms, "including taxes, without shipping fees" next to the price, such stuff. DRMasterChief and mannefred have named a few additional ones above.

@lesley said in German support for thirty bees: We realize things are very different over there in regard to the ecommerce laws I think this is mostly a misconception. Some 90% of what's "german e-commerce law" is based more or less directly on EU legislation. For some parts, like revocation terms, EU law is applied directly. For other parts it's done by national implementations. In short: law for all EU countries is (almost) the same. What makes the situation in Germany so tedious is our (AFAIK, worldwide unique) Abmahnwesen. Every competitor of a website can hire a lawyer and send the owner of that website a Abmahnung (cease and desist letter) for whatever that competitor thinks is not in entire agreement with laws on that site. No police, no state attorney, no court, no judge required. So far it's still similar to other countries. The really bad part here is, the website owner has to compensate (pay!) for the damage the competitor thinks he has suffered. And the website owner also has to pay for the lawyer. Unless that owner disagrees and pulls the case to court. Result of this situation is that lawyers started to search for faults on websites, then to search for competitors which could claim damages and lawyer fees. If this is done with some scripting and series cease-and-desist letters, it can be a source of pretty big income. Kind of an "industry" was born. On top of that there are competitors which try to jerk their competition, of course. Result of these revenue seeking lawyers is that even pretty minor faults get claimed. There are court cases where it was to decide whether it's sufficient to notify users about EU Online Dispute Resolution link or whether this link has to be clickable. Cases where website owners were found "guilty" to have their forename shortened to a single letter instead of having it written in full. Such stuff. Tl;dr: at the bottom line, german shop owners have to comply with the about same laws as all other european shop owners, but they're way, way, way, more keen on getting everything right to the smallest detail. Because every detail done wrong comes with a bill, with loss of cash.