Thirty Bees Future Announcement

[datakick]

Hello everybody and happy new year.

I spent a lovely Christmas / end of the year with my family, without access to internet, computers, and so on. I feel fully charged and ready for this new challenge. So let's do this.

I must confess that I was a little dishearthed with the cold response to the announcement. While I understand you guys don't really care if this project continues under the same name, it's a big deal to us. Fork would be a very different starting point. It's very nice to have hundreds of active websites using our platform already. And it's amazing to inherit existing thirtybees infrastructure (forum, websites, demo, api servers, mail servers, translations, deployment, testing). If we were to start from scratch, it would take us a year to get to this point. The effort to achieve this would be huge, and nobody would really benefit from that. Especially not you, merchants. After a lot of mundane work we would end up at the very same spot we are now. If we weren't able to close a deal, I'm not sure if we would even try to do this. So yeah, we were really excited about it. But I am fully aware that you don't really care about all of this. You expect roadmap, business plan, etc... and it's a fair point. So let me talk a bit about this.

Monetizing strategy:

Our team have talked a lot about different ways to earn money that are needed to keep this project afloat. Realistically there is only a handful of them that we can pulled off, considering our limited resources. For example, we have dismissed the idea of providing SAAS or PAAS service.

In the first few months, the majority of revenues will come from the support services that we will provide to merchants. This means that portion of my development time will be allocated to paid support. We believe that this is the best way to bring in some money right away. Also, the existence and availability of official support will surely make platform more attractive to undecided merchants.

Support services revenue model does not scale well, though. There is only finite amount of time we can provide. Even though we want to bring other developers aboard, the time will still be a limiting factor.  We are fully aware of this and we have few other plans for a long run.

Development:

First of all, I want you to know that I will devote 100% of my time to this project, starting February. Currently I'm finishing my current development contract, and closing my existing activities (for example support service I provide via datakick agency). That means that this month I will work on thirtybees only part time. But come February you will start to see some real progress.

As I wrote above, part of my time will be dedicated to support, something between 30% and 40%. The rest of my time will be dedicated to

• github maintenance - I will scrub and address each and every issue, pull requests, doing code review, etc.
• bugfixing - issues will be categorised by severity, and some of them will be fixed. Not all - that's just not possible. I expect to spend 15% of time on this. That should be good enough to fix around 40 serious issues per release.
• new feature work - for every release we will select (with your help) some new features, and we will commit to implement them. I expect to spend around 25% of my time on this area. If you have some ideas what you would like to see in the core, or idea for new module, let us know (unless it's multiple feature value, I've heard that one 100 times 🙂
• platform enhancements - the rest of my capacity will be dedicated to platform enhancements. These are development tasks that you, as merchants, will not immediately benefit from. But they just need to be implemented. Some of these tasks will not be very popular, I'm sure. For example, I want to implement some tracking in order to have good knowledge about system usage. Such information will allows us to focus our efforts on areas that are heavily used. (But don't worry, we will be very correct. No data without your consent will be sent to us). Other tasks from this area will be more appreciated, such as php 8 support. Or tool to create custom field for product or customers, or to edit properties of existing fields.

Release cycle:

Our main focus always was, and will continue to be, on stability. Based on our experience we strongly believe that merchants don't really want, or need, too many releases. So we decided to have just two major releases per year. Other than that, we will have monthly bugfix releases, that will contain high severity bugs only. There will also be bleeding edge release that will always point to the latest development (just for brave). Bleeding edge is de facto Release Candidate.

All of these releases will be available for download, and of course via core updater.

The first official release will be prepared in a few days. It will be branched from current bleeding edge.

Partnerships:
For thirtybees to succeed we need to have thriving ecosystem. That means both merchants and third party developers. We have quite a lot merchants using our system already, which is a good news. Unfortunately the situation with module and theme developers is more worrying. Sad fact is that there aren't many developers that support our platform at the moment. And we need to change that. We have a plan to actively outreach to them, offer our help with adapting their modules and themes, make it easier for them to become part of our platform. If you know about some module you would like to see adopted, PM me details!

[Messenger Bee]

Awesomeness! Great to have @datakick onboard! TB 2.0 here we go! 😀

[rubben1985]

@datakick Great! the same announcement followed by this would have been totally different 🙂

Good to hear! 

[rubben1985]

 

I was going to write some considerations in the feature topic, but maybe here is more correct to let that topic only for features:

-the most critical for me is fixing the modules incompatibility with TB if a user detect it (not depending only on forum but kind of official support. Datakick offering something similar but just saying)

- Improve the appearance of the TB home and CMS, image is very important to show something is alive and improving. My 2cnts: directly imitate the big ones (claims, designs, sections...) and once you have it, give your own personality. 

- not to include to much free stuff in addition to the actual version. Modules have to be sold at the end too 😉 . I prefer to pay for modules that having TB with low income.

- Idea: if any developer do not want to sell their module in TB marketplace because they are not going to give support, you can just advertise them for free in the marketplace with a link to their website if you can help guaranteeing compatibility. This indicate to merchant that those modules are compatible and you increase "your marketplace richness". Sure you are giving free ad but you earn people knowing there are a lot of modules compatible with TB (believe me, TB guarantee compatibility is my continuous fear when buying new modules in PS marketplace)

Edited January 6, 2021 by rubben1985

[veganline]

Siteground and A2 hosting seem to fund CE Phoenix which is a fork of OS Commerce I saw

Edited January 6, 2021 by veganline

[AndyC]

Just now, veganline said:

Siteground and A2 hosting seem to fund CE Phoenix which is a fork of OS Commerce I saw on my installer

I would stay away from Siteground, I had endless problems with them.. They have awful limits and my 1 script which updates google shopping was a nightmare.

I do how ever wish I had gone over to A2 rather than who I am with now

[musicmaster]

21 hours ago, Messenger Bee said:

Good idea. And thanks to @musicmaster  of course for Prestools and for your contributions and input throughout the years. Although imo, it's more for advanced users rather than casual or new shopkeepers. 

However, if it is decided to do this, then it will have to be modulised, styled, tidied up and afterwards maintained, and obviously permission from musicmaster. And you know, with limited resources...

But good idea nonetheless, imo

When someone wants to build a module from Prestools product-edit I would be happy to cooperate. The most popular mass edit module on Prestashop Addons (https://addons.prestashop.com/en/fast-mass-updates/19965-bulk-mass-editing-products.html) looks like it took quite a lot of inspiration from Prestools. If such a module was made both for Thirty Bees and Prestashop it could pay for itself.

As I see it mass edit and cronjobs are areas that have a broad appeal and could help TB too.

One of the latest additions to Prestools was image edit that allows you to add images by drag and drop. You need to generate thumbnails afterwards as otherwise it would take too much time. However, for Prestashop 1.7 that is not necessary as it generates its thumbnails on the fly. It might be a good things to have such a thing in Thirty Bees too. Also for mass import by csv.

Many of the latest additions to Prestools concern maintainability: integrity checks and cleanup procedures. My main inspiration was that I had to deal with some old shops with quite a lot of decay. As I see it, such old shops should play some role in the discussion about stability.

[Traumflug]

On 1/5/2021 at 7:11 PM, musicmaster said:

easy targets - as is support for PHP 8

Not really. The problem with PHP8 is that PHP introduced a class 'Attribute' as part of the language/library. PS/tb/ME use a class of the same name for product attributes, which results in a conflict.

Renaming the class wouldn't be that hard, of course. But it breaks all modules dealing with product attributes, they'd have to rename the class as well. Not easy with the plethora of widely used modules pretty much abandoned by their developer.

Currently I have no idea on how to deal with this in a backwards compatible way. Ideally one could simply unload/ignore the PHP class. Not sure whether this is possible.

[Sigi]

https://gitter.im/thirtybees/General?utm_source=notification&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=unread-notifications#
maybe there should be some notification to the tb forum. Otherwise it seems to be like some people can´t find it

[Traumflug]

Gitter is no longer linked anywhere. No idea how people get there.

[danwarrior]

On 1/6/2021 at 12:24 PM, datakick said:

Hello everybody and happy new year.

I spent a lovely Christmas / end of the year with my family, without access to internet, computers, and so on. I feel fully charged and ready for this new challenge. So let's do this.

I must confess that I was a little dishearthed with the cold response to the announcement. While I understand you guys don't really care if this project continues under the same name, it's a big deal to us. Fork would be a very different starting point. It's very nice to have hundreds of active websites using our platform already. And it's amazing to inherit existing thirtybees infrastructure (forum, websites, demo, api servers, mail servers, translations, deployment, testing). If we were to start from scratch, it would take us a year to get to this point. The effort to achieve this would be huge, and nobody would really benefit from that. Especially not you, merchants. After a lot of mundane work we would end up at the very same spot we are now. If we weren't able to close a deal, I'm not sure if we would even try to do this. So yeah, we were really excited about it. But I am fully aware that you don't really care about all of this. You expect roadmap, business plan, etc... and it's a fair point. So let me talk a bit about this.

Monetizing strategy:

Our team have talked a lot about different ways to earn money that are needed to keep this project afloat. Realistically there is only a handful of them that we can pulled off, considering our limited resources. For example, we have dismissed the idea of providing SAAS or PAAS service.

In the first few months, the majority of revenues will come from the support services that we will provide to merchants. This means that portion of my development time will be allocated to paid support. We believe that this is the best way to bring in some money right away. Also, the existence and availability of official support will surely make platform more attractive to undecided merchants.

Support services revenue model does not scale well, though. There is only finite amount of time we can provide. Even though we want to bring other developers aboard, the time will still be a limiting factor.  We are fully aware of this and we have few other plans for a long run.

Development:

First of all, I want you to know that I will devote 100% of my time to this project, starting February. Currently I'm finishing my current development contract, and closing my existing activities (for example support service I provide via datakick agency). That means that this month I will work on thirtybees only part time. But come February you will start to see some real progress.

As I wrote above, part of my time will be dedicated to support, something between 30% and 40%. The rest of my time will be dedicated to

• github maintenance - I will scrub and address each and every issue, pull requests, doing code review, etc.
• bugfixing - issues will be categorised by severity, and some of them will be fixed. Not all - that's just not possible. I expect to spend 15% of time on this. That should be good enough to fix around 40 serious issues per release.
• new feature work - for every release we will select (with your help) some new features, and we will commit to implement them. I expect to spend around 25% of my time on this area. If you have some ideas what you would like to see in the core, or idea for new module, let us know (unless it's multiple feature value, I've heard that one 100 times 🙂
• platform enhancements - the rest of my capacity will be dedicated to platform enhancements. These are development tasks that you, as merchants, will not immediately benefit from. But they just need to be implemented. Some of these tasks will not be very popular, I'm sure. For example, I want to implement some tracking in order to have good knowledge about system usage. Such information will allows us to focus our efforts on areas that are heavily used. (But don't worry, we will be very correct. No data without your consent will be sent to us). Other tasks from this area will be more appreciated, such as php 8 support. Or tool to create custom field for product or customers, or to edit properties of existing fields.

Release cycle:

Our main focus always was, and will continue to be, on stability. Based on our experience we strongly believe that merchants don't really want, or need, too many releases. So we decided to have just two major releases per year. Other than that, we will have monthly bugfix releases, that will contain high severity bugs only. There will also be bleeding edge release that will always point to the latest development (just for brave). Bleeding edge is de facto Release Candidate.

All of these releases will be available for download, and of course via core updater.

The first official release will be prepared in a few days. It will be branched from current bleeding edge.

Partnerships:
For thirtybees to succeed we need to have thriving ecosystem. That means both merchants and third party developers. We have quite a lot merchants using our system already, which is a good news. Unfortunately the situation with module and theme developers is more worrying. Sad fact is that there aren't many developers that support our platform at the moment. And we need to change that. We have a plan to actively outreach to them, offer our help with adapting their modules and themes, make it easier for them to become part of our platform. If you know about some module you would like to see adopted, PM me details!

Hi, Pietr! Sorry because I just see now this post, and I was wondering what will be happening with this projecct, because I think I'm the only marketing focused person here promoting it and creating content.

I need some time to read all, I wanted to contact you from a few days ago because I have good probed ideas for monetizing, marketing and growing. This is my speciality since long time ago, and I know how to do it with little resources.

Will write you soon!

About the name, I would maintain the same, even if you make lots of changes in the future. Because it takes time too to positionate a new "branding", and even if TB is "new" for many people yet, it has been through the most difficult phase of "launching" and I feel it begins to be stable and have good options to get more and more users (generating income, not only through support). About this, there is a big world further than support, that's why I want to read and understand deeply your personal focus and intention, and give some ideas in the same frecuency.

Great to have news at last! (Didn't receive any notification before from the forum and Slack is silent...)

[superbiche]

On 1/23/2021 at 2:55 PM, Traumflug said:

Gitter is no longer linked anywhere. No idea how people get there.

It's linked on https://thirtybees.com/

=> Contribute => Chat on Gitter

[led24ee]

On 1/6/2021 at 8:24 PM, datakick said:

Hello everybody and happy new year.

 

The first official release will be prepared in a few days. It will be branched from current bleeding edge.

 

Looks like I'm missing something.

[datakick]

30 minutes ago, led24ee said:

Looks like I'm missing something.

The reason for the delay was caused only by me only, and I apologise for it.

The plan was for me to start working on thirtybees full time at the beginning of February.

I used to work as an independent contractor for a big client in a bank industry, and I was contractually bound to deliver a lot of work for them. Since the team didn't meet the delivery timeline I was forced to work for them until the end of February. I officially ended that contract last Friday. So, finally, I'm free and able to work on this project 100%.

Right now I'm working on initial release, it will be done by the end of this week, probably Thursday or Friday. And then there is a very big backlog of things waiting to be done.

[Kashir2000]

So.... how is it going? Repository seems to be not updated since 1.2.0. Anything going on in background?