5 years on Prestashop (1.7.8.2 now)... Is it worth migrating to TB?

[vallka]

Hi everybody here. Just recently discovered TB... and got such a deja vu... We have migrated our PS website from 1.6 to 1.7 in 2018 and it was such a pain and disappointment... But we have survived. And at that time I really had the idea to fork PS and start my own version based oh PS 1.6.... never happened of cause, but you did it :) Congrats!

So now I'm aware of TB and could it be a good idea to migrate 'back" from PS 1.7.8.2? I'm an experienced developer, now I know a lot of PS details, fixed a few bugs here and there... Our main problem is - yes, you guess it - it is impossible to get anything from PS team. All my requests were un-answered, all my fixes and correction rejected (well, apart from a very little one (https://github.com/PrestaShop/productcomments/pull/124)

Unresolved issues are (some of them I have fixed for myself using overrides):

• Impossible to use mobile_detect in module templates (Front office) (ok in theme templates but doesn't work in module templates (https://github.com/PrestaShop/PrestaShop/issues/21661))
• Problems with PayPal and Laybuy in Safari (and most probably elsewhere) due to the old bug in Safari browser with cookie header "SameSite"
• Inconsistent calculation if %% discounts in orders. It has radically changed from PS 1.6 to 1.7 - and it causes severe problems with some payment providers like Klarna or Laybuy (https://dev.to/vallka/laybuy-against-prestashop-193l) - these payment modules are not aware of the change and simply refuse to work with %% discounts! For more then 3 years now!!!
• Same or similar issues with discount figures and delivery costs in invoices, the numbers are still inconsistent in some cases
• Some bugs are never fixed in payment modules like Stripe and Klarna for years. These modules are not developed by PS so I don't even know who to address these...
• Multiple bugs in multi-store implementation, never fixed. In fact, I decided to use two separate sites - it's better. I think the multi-store feature is not worth using, it is inconsistent and often misleading
• Really useless statistics. I ended up writing my own statistics using Python, pandas, Plotly, and Django.
• Inconsistent tax rules (or I still cannot figure out how to use this feature?)
• Extremely mobile-un-friendly design of both front and back office, and really difficult to do anything with it (partly due to issue 1) (and just to mention here - such a mess of using Smarty/Symfony/Twig/whatever templating systems... never know where to look for a particular template, especially in BO)
• Overall bad design on database level... Just to mention duplicated data in ps_product and ps_product_shop and similar pairs of tables. Maybe repeating myself, but IMHO multi-store functionality simply cannot be used in the form it is designed now. But even worse - if I don't use multi-store, the data are still duplicated!!!
• In general, bugs come and go, go and come back :) never know what to expect when you are upgrading PS. 
• ... and so on...
•  

Is ThirtyBees better than PS at least in some of these issues? Is it worth considering? And I would gladly participate in core or module development myself, if allowed :)

Thank you for reading :)

Valentine aka "vallka"

https://www.vallka.com/
https://www.gellifique.co.uk/en/
https://www.gellifique.eu/es/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[wakabayashi]

TB is an improved and stable version of 1.6. But let's be honest, if we all look at all bugs and bad desings PS 1.6 has, TB could maybe solve 10% of it and 90% is still left. The Dev Team is very small, but IMO very powerful. The few people working on code here, know the system pretty well. 

2 hours ago, vallka said:

Impossible to use mobile_detect in module templates (Front office) (ok in theme templates but doesn't work in module templates (https://github.com/PrestaShop/PrestaShop/issues/21661))

If you deliver a PR on github with the fix, it will sooner or later be implemented. The rule is basically, that another Dev needs to check the PR first.

2 hours ago, vallka said:

Multiple bugs in multi-store implementation, never fixed. In fact, I decided to use two separate sites - it's better. I think the multi-store feature is not worth using, it is inconsistent and often misleading

Yeah you are right. But this sentence is not specific. What are you talking exactly about? I am using multistore since years. It has it's bugs, but you can work with it.

2 hours ago, vallka said:

Really useless statistics. I ended up writing my own statistics using Python, pandas, Plotly, and Django.

Did the same here. But why using other coding language? I prefer to write everything in PHP, so it could be merged in future.

2 hours ago, vallka said:

Inconsistent tax rules (or I still cannot figure out how to use this feature?)

Hard to say. Taxes were improved. There were multiple bugs, especially about rounding too early...

2 hours ago, vallka said:

Extremely mobile-un-friendly design of both front and back office, and really difficult to do anything with it (partly due to issue 1) (and just to mention here - such a mess of using Smarty/Symfony/Twig/whatever templating systems... never know where to look for a particular template, especially in BO)

Right. And we didn't make an serious improvement on this.

2 hours ago, vallka said:

Overall bad design on database level... Just to mention duplicated data in ps_product and ps_product_shop and similar pairs of tables. Maybe repeating myself, but IMHO multi-store functionality simply cannot be used in the form it is designed now. But even worse - if I don't use multi-store, the data are still duplicated!!!

Often such things can't be changed so easily, because it would break some modules/themes. I don't like it either, but it doesn't harm my shop much. This influences my shop probably for 0.00001% if it will be sucessful or not. I think, you know what I mean.

 

Why don't you just set up a test TB and play a bit around? Obviously you can also check github, to see what happened in the past. 

[vallka]

Quote

Why don't you just set up a test TB and play a bit around? Obviously you can also check github, to see what happened in the past. 

Yes, I'm planning to do this sooner or later. Apparently the task won't be easy (I mean migrating all or some of our custom stuff), but worth trying

Thank you for your reply.

[Beeta]

welcome onboard @vallka!

[MarcinJ]

Prestashop still don't support webp 😁

[vallka]

41 minutes ago, MarcinJ said:

Prestashop still don't support webp 😁

It doesn't matter for me, I did it my own way.... A way better I think 🙂
https://www.vallka.com/blog/prestashop-and-imagekit/

Any comments on my implementation? This one should be easily repeated on TB...

 

PS

There are a lot of things Prestashop doesn't support..(yet or for good) Bulk actions on Products in BO, for example... We badly badly needed this as our shop contains hundreds of similar products. I did it my own way, I like my implementation. Unfortunately for others the backend is written on Django as I started to hate PHP after a few innovations some years ago, namely Composer and other related stuff... 🙂

Edited February 15, 2022 by vallka

[veganline]

On 2/8/2022 at 6:51 PM, vallka said:

Some bugs are never fixed in ... Stripe . These modules are not developed by PS so I don't even know who to address these...

I've had some unpaid help from the developer who fixed the Stripe module or Thirtybees code round it. He did some detective work on Thirtybees code and fixed something obscure from way-back. It works as it should for basic UK pound transactions.

(I do test the limits a bit by ignoring all known laws about cookie warnings. In response, I guess that the odd customer's settings don't accept the cookie that returns from Stripe, after payment, to the shopping cart, so they don't know that they've paid and I have to extract data from abandoned carts and stripe to reassure them and know where to post the order. It hasn't happened for a month or two so maybe I can get away with it and it won't happen again.)

I know that some people are willing to pay so-much-a-month to the likes of Shopify just to get this kind of detail out of their job description and reduce risk. Last time I looked, there was a guarantee of technical help within so-many hours for people who donate so-much a month to Thirtybees, but I can't remember where I saw it or how much a month.
 

On 2/8/2022 at 6:51 PM, vallka said:

Extremely mobile-un-friendly design

Customer 1 at Fawlty Towers: "This must be the worst hotel in the country"
Customer 2 "Oh no. There's one in Eastbourne.."

When I check Google search console, I can avoid any penalties for bad coding on the mobile version of the site, and I get orders from people on smartphones. I use the free default Niara theme with a lot of hacking. A huge amount can be done with css in backoffice > preferences > custom code. I hope Prestashop has this as well now, but it didn't when I last looked a few years ago.  My site has a lot of navigation stuff at the top of each mobile page, but that's mainly the way I've hacked the theme about; I don't know if other themes and other types of shopping cart are much better or worse.

For experiments, Thirtybees is on Softaculous and Installatron, so your host might allow you very quick automated installations. Last time I looked it was not in Fantastico but I hope they include it some time.

On 2/8/2022 at 6:51 PM, vallka said:

mobile-un-friendly design ... back office,

I bought Prestashop Manager from emagicone which has a free smartphone app and am happy to sell the licence half-price if transferrable. The software tries to help with import and export to spreadsheets too. It works on thirtybees so I suppose most of the other apps on Google Play designed for Prestashop work on Thirtybees, including free ones. Oh and https://www.prestools.com/ - Prestools Suite works on Thirtybees. The author sometimes posts of the forum about keeping it compatible. Prestools does not have a smartphone app but does allow several bulk operations in the free version and one or two extra tweaks with paid modules.

I'm not technical enough to answer most of your points but just happened to see them and wanted to wish you luck whatever you do.

Edited February 16, 2022 by veganline

[led24ee]

On 2/15/2022 at 9:09 PM, vallka said:

It doesn't matter for me, I did it my own way.... A way better I think 🙂
https://www.vallka.com/blog/prestashop-and-imagekit/

Any comments on my implementation? This one should be easily repeated on TB...

 

PS

There are a lot of things Prestashop doesn't support..(yet or for good) Bulk actions on Products in BO, for example... We badly badly needed this as our shop contains hundreds of similar products. I did it my own way, I like my implementation. Unfortunately for others the backend is written on Django as I started to hate PHP after a few innovations some years ago, namely Composer and other related stuff... 🙂

You can try "Prestools Suite" for bulk actions for products.

[zen]

For bulk actions there is no officialy supported software for TB , even store manager try with very first versions of TB.. not enough customers to maintain this need, but it still should work fine, as well as merlin back office and store commander that works for presta 1.6 but the support is no more available for this version.

Otherwise welcome on board vallka .. I can recommand you to try my new theme based on boostrap 5 available here for your tests : forum thread

maybe a good opportunity to make something better !

 

 

[nickz]

A renewal of a shop has the advantage that your database is slimmer which should make your shop faster. A renewal could also make a split possible of products not fitting into the same category, advantage ranking.

Edited February 17, 2022 by nickz