Progress sharing

[hubbobubbo]

One thing that I really disliked with PS in the past was that it was impossible to know what was going on in the project. It seems however that they have improved a lot in this area, I really like these kind of posts they do with the core weekly news: http://build.prestashop.com/

I do not want to suggest adding more admin tasks to TB since its a small project so far but having some sort of progress updates would be really nice. 1.0.3 is from August last year and the RC1 for 1.0.4 is almost . 3 months old. I am following the commits on github but it does not give a good insight in what is currently in progress.

In short, it would be really nice to have perhaps a biweekly or even monthly short summary of what is going in development wise? If this is already available somewhere I apologize in advance for missing it.

[wakabayashi]

You are right, that would be nice. But I guess "we" are just lacking manpower... I guess such a service, will only be realistic when Patreon generates serious income. So Lesley and Michael can work "seriously" on this project.

[MockoB]

I think they do work seriously and I really hope they are working on something huge because I can't see also any commits on github recently. When there are enough running shops on thirty bees, there will be patreon income also. It's closed circle, if there isn't completely working solution there won't be enough shops and income.

[Briljander]

I was also checking out GitHub yesterday and noticed the lack of commits. Would also be glad to know what is going on.

[wakabayashi]

@MockoB with seriously I meant like "if they can devote all their time into tb". Now tb doesn't generate income, so they have to agree on many other coding projects, to save their incomes.

[Tomik]

@mockob said in Progress sharing:

I think they do work seriously and I really hope they are working on something huge because I can't see also any commits on github recently. When there are enough running shops on thirty bees, there will be patreon income also. It's closed circle, if there isn't completely working solution there won't be enough shops and income.

i agree with this and like said in other threads as well its a circle, altho keeping us up2date weekly does give a feeling of support that its still being worked on :)

[musicmaster]

@wakabayashi said in Progress sharing:

@MockoB with seriously I meant like "if they can devote all their time into tb". Now tb doesn't generate income, so they have to agree on many other coding projects, to save their incomes.

Thirty Bees started aiming to be a Prestashop 1.6 without the bugs. Prestashop is making millions so if they accomplished even a part of this they would have stuck gold. Yet I have been puzzled by the implementation.

Prestashop's strength is that 9 out of 10 times it works out of the box. Of course it has it problems but they tend to be deeper down. But the basis is very smooth. Unfortunately I am missing that smoothness in Thirty Bees. The core looks great but it has a lot of rough edges. It is easy to work around those rough edges when you know a bit about software but it is a big obstacle when Thirty Bees wants to be the successor of Prestashop. Try to do an upgrade or a migration from Prestashop: it is a disaster.

What is worrying in this respect is that I don't see any indication that this will change. Michael seems to love the heavy stuff - like speed optimization, payment modules and search modules. But getting things working smoothly is mostly attention to detail - and a dedication to userfriendliness. From a technical point of view the problems are often trivial. The love of innovation has also harmed the maintenance of compatibility with Prestashop. Was it really necessary that compatibility of themes became a major problem?

I made some contribution to the upgrade module - and saw my contribution disappear in smoke without explanation. My feeling is sometimes that Lesley and Michael are disappointed by the speed of adoption of Thirty Bees and are developing doubts about the project. It looks like they haven't given up yet, but that they don't have a clear idea any more on how to go forward.

[wakabayashi]

@musicmaster I am really surprised that you always have problems with migrating. When I switched I did a lot of tests. I always suceeded. It worked in real like a charm. And I am using multistore, have a lot of products, orders and stuff. So I really don't know where there problems are...

You are talking of simplicity or userfriendliness. I agree, that this is very important. But what does it mean concret? What I learnt here the last weeks and months is, that needs are extremly heterogenous. Even things, which I was completly sure, that many people would suffer from it, didn't get too much support. For example I thougth "order editing" is really really important. But not many people joined the discussion. Same for Bundles, Multistore or ASM.

Where would you start to make the software better?

[MockoB]

I have to agree more or less with @musicmaster . One thing I hope he's wrong that Michael and Lesley gave up the project, it would be huge disappointment especially for those with already running shops or those who have plans like me. There is no business which could make you millionaire for one year especially in so competitive niche like ecommerce. I see everyday new shops, more developers joining the compatibility program and I really believe there is great future for thirty bees. All the new implementations I see in the platform are really great and make tb the preferred choice but as @musicmaster said the details make something perfect, not just functionality. @wakabayashi many ppl have issues with the migration I can see everyday posts from @movieseals and others also. The theme compatibility is a must until the time when there are more ppl using tb than ps. @wakabayashi order editing, bundles, multistore and asm are too specific, and that's why there wasn't much interest I think. Actually I don't even know what bundles and asm is. I just heard of multistor and never had any need to edit an order... but is never late to face such issues. If tb comes up with working GDPR solution and working eu compliance module it would be few more things ahead of ps.

[Norwegian_Rat]

Our experience with tb and migration is nothing but great. Migrating from PS to tb was by far a much easier task than a PS-patch upgrade. And knowing we came from PS 1.4, I would say such a flawless migration is proof of pretty darn solid work! But of course, we had to disable and uninstall bought modules that caused issues. But we cant expect them to take every module that's out there into account when developing a migration tool

[smarterweb]

This topic and it's replies worries us big time. Can we get a somewhat official statement from TB? We have been (like many others) spending lots of time setting up new shops in TB and from what I hear now, this project may not even go ahead much longer??? I totally get the point that there's a lack of funding (we are Patreon supporters by the way :) - but we also need to make decisions if this is the right platform to go ahead with and that there will be future updates and support. So please, an official statement would be great. In the meantime...., eagerly waiting for the release of 1.0.4

[lesley]

I have been watching this post since it was opened considering how best to respond. I guess I do not understand what kind of progress updates everyone wants. For 1.0.4 we have pretty much finished with it. As @musicmaster mentioned he did a couple of bug fixes in the migrator / updater. They were not included because we are trying to write a more robust solution and not just patch the current solution. This is what the hold up with releasing 1.0.4 is. Our current updater takes around 8 hours to make a version update for. We are trying to do something more streamlined so we can release faster updates, but we need to get the updater fixed first.

[smarterweb]

great, thanks Lesley for the update! that's exactly the sort of update one wants to see I guess. Last time I read about 1.0.4 release was that the hold up had to do with the upcoming GDPR.

[Tomik]

@smarterweb said in Progress sharing:

great, thanks Lesley for the update! that's exactly the sort of update one wants to see I guess. Last time I read about 1.0.4 release was that the hold up had to do with the upcoming GDPR.

Yes what he said :) this is exactly the kind of updates that we people need

[movieseals]

I made no secret that migration was not easy for me. However, I must point out that support has been nothing but forthcoming and people have helped me above and beyond, which is not always the case at the other place. We have 20,000+ products, with lots of modules to add to the functionalities we need to run our shop, and most of the problems where caused by the following:

• My own ignorance and inexperience;
• Lots of third party modules;
• Server issues, which I have come to learn, even with Prestashop, are not always easy to pinpoint and even when you think you have addressed it, there is still something lurking somewhere else causing it;

Despite the pain and the natural fear that comes from migrating such a big shop, all things considered, I do not regret it one bit. Backend is blazing fast. Front end is faster than it has ever been. SEO has improved by leaps and bounds. There is lots of little perks and functionalities that should have been in Prestashop that I discover almost daily...

I have looked for a long time for a solution for our ecommerce and I found that the prestashop environment seemed to offer the best balance of cost, scalability and possibilities of expansion. That is what drew me to the platform. It is not always easy, but it gives me the flexibility I need. I find that the TB people seem to share that same spirit. I have high hopes in the product and I also prefer it to starting from scratch with the Frankensteinization currently occuring with Prestashop... I tried 1.7 before deciding on TB and the amount of work to bring things up to what they were on 1.6.17 far exceeded the time I spent migrating to TB...

Fingers crossed for the future.

[hubbobubbo]

@lesley I think my original question got a bit side tracked by various comments. I have the deepest respect for what you are trying to accomplish and I have tried to get started twice but had some issues so I am waiting for the official 1.0.4.

Just to be perfectly clear, if you look at my first comment again I just highlighted the Core weekly blogposts from Prestashop as something that I find helpful. You write amazing blogposts and I have read them for years. My only comment was that if there would be a short blogpost maybe 1-2 times a month about how development is progressing, where is the focus issues etc it would be helpful and interesting reading. Then later on once you have tickets etc those could be referred to as well from these posts. I do not want to suggest more administrative work, simply a way to easy follow what is going on.

[musicmaster]

My experience with migration from Prestashop was as follows: - after a seemingly successful migration I opened my shop's front end to find little more than my logo. It took me considerable time before I understood that in the process TB had disabled all non-TB modules. And as it doesn't replace Prestashop modules with their Thirty Bees equivalent that is nearly everything: blockcart, blockcategories, blockcms, homefeatured, etc. So you end up with a very empty screen. - having arrived at 1.01 I wanted to update to 1.03. Being a lazy person I went for the default - and hang forever. Only when I tried to upgrade without the backup did I succeed. - with the migration I had opted to keep my old template (the PS default). But now I decided to try the TB default one. Strangely enough there isn't some place where you can get this just like any other theme. Instead there was some button to install the default theme. So I clicked that button - and I lost my frontoffice. It pointed to an empty directory that was supposed to contain the default theme. Copying the theme from a fresh installation solved the situation.

If you asked 100 people to start this journey how many would not give up half way? This is basic functionality that a large part of the potential users will encounter. It should just work fluently and according to what the average ignorant user expects.

I started to work on the update module to do something about these problems. It was a rather strange experience. The code is just the old Prestashop code with some changes. Unfortunately those changes had introduced quite a lot of bugs and two of those bugs created an eternal loop. It really puzzles me why this had to stay dysfunctional for such a long time. Was it slow? It depends how you look. The backup might take hours if you had a megashop with gigabytes of data but for the average shop it was ok. Prestashop has been able to live with it for many years without much complaints. And the starting point for optimization was obvious: the present algorithm makes many ajax calls a second that each backup a few files or database elements. Increasing the chunk size would be a quick and easy solution.

[wakabayashi]

@musicmaster thanks for your post. It's this kind of feedback, which I wish more for tb. I have to admit, that I never do a backup when upgrading. I always do this myself in mysq. I also haven't done a theme switch. I dunno, but I have the community theme in my themes folder... I didnt put it there. But I agree, it should be on store: https://store.thirtybees.com/shop-themes

Still it seems to me, that merchants are mixing things up. They either have a fully working shop or they call the migration tool "buggy". When I read your post, I have the feeling, that your problem isn't the migration but the configuration of the store after the migration.

[lesley]

@musicmaster This is exactly why we are trying to rewrite the module from scratch. As we have mentioned before we are a small team, anything we can do to save time on tasks is something we have to consider. Since the builds and upgrade builds are so time consuming and this module is so unstable we found this to be a must to do.

[DRMasterChief]

...and there is also an option in the store to grab some support (before or after or for an migration), and yes this have to be paid, but that is an correct way for such an support and will generate some income for the TB team. "Maybe" someone will use this :)

[musicmaster]

@lesley The module is not unstable. The bugs that were there were caused by the migration of the code from Prestashop to TB. Sure, there is always room for improvement but the problems weren't so serious that the backup part of the module had to be kept dysfunctional for over a year.

I made some bugfixes and they were implemented in tbupdater 1.2.4. There was still one problem left but I needed to work on other things. Finally I came back and fixed the last problem and sent it to Michael. And then he published 1.2.5 that undid all the fixes of 1.2.4. And I never got an explanation...

@wakabayashi Except for the update backup everything did what it was designed to do - and that's the problem. Even the backup part's dysfunction was more or less intentional when you consider how long it has been the case and how my code that should repair it was being ignored.

[hubbobubbo]

After 18 days without any commits on github I would just like to repeat my initial question. Would it be possible to get any kind of status/progress information on how the 1.0.4 work is coming along? I would really like to help with testing it but since my previous attempt of installingRC1 did not work I am holding on for the official release.

[lesley]

Starting the first of April I am going to try to do a progress post every two weeks letting people know what we are working on. We have so many different channels and mediums that it is difficult sometimes. I know in the past week I have talked about us working on the updater to our slack and gitter channels. But have not mentioned it on the forum I guess. That is the need for the blog posts I assume.

[wakabayashi]

@lesley maybe gitter is no more needed. It's not that active and slack does the job well. So it gets a bit more lucidly.

[lesley]

Slack is invite only, gitter is open to who ever pops by. I would assume close the slack channel down before the gitter channel.