I'm about to upgrade my small online shop based on old Spree version. I was planning to use newest branch 3.X, but after project being drop by SpreeCommerce company I was thinking to switch to Solidus (they seems to pay more focus more stability and reliability). But last month new core team took the project in their hands.
Are there any Solidus or Spree developers who could tell what would be better. Stick to Spree or move on to Solidus? Or maybe use different e-commerce RoR app like Shoppe or ror_ecommerce. I'm happy to see what are your thoughts?
Some articles
2016/01 Spree new Core Team
https://spreecommerce.com/blog/spree-roadmap-announcement
2015/10 Spree dropped support [officially]
https://spreecommerce.com/blog/future-of-spree-oss
2015/09 Solidus - new Spree fork
http://resolve.digital/blog/posts/spree-commerce-acquired-is-it-time-to-move-your-spree-store-to-solidus
Github activity
Update
Spark Solutions made interesting starter kit including Spree and React.
https://github.com/spark-solutions/spark-starter-kit.
The Blue Stout folk wrote a pretty comprehensive blog post a couple of weeks ago about this same conversation. The pros and cons could have been listed so that they were a little bit more parallel, but I think it's still helpful as they mention some things that aren't in the articles above.
http://bluestout.com/blog/spree-vs-solidus-ecommerce-platforms/
I interviewed core team members of both Spree Commerce and Solidus and have written up a comprehensive blog post about Spree vs Solidus. It covers the history of the projects and how we've ultimately ended up with Spree and Solidus.
Here's what I concluded:
Our customers who are on Spree will likely stay on Spree, but new stores we build will be on Solidus. This is because behind all the noise, we think Solidus is the future.
When it comes down to it, here’s what we recommend as of today:
New Stores: Use Solidus
Existing Spree 3.x Stores: Stay on Spree
Existing Spree 2.x Stores: Make a case by case decision about if you
want to move to Solidus on stay on Spree.
Existing Spree 1.x Stores: Upgrade to Spree 2.4
If I was building a small ecommerce app I'd be looking at Shopify first. Only if I couldn't customize a store to my needs would I look at something as big as Spree or Solidus. The financial and time cost of a dev team to put either together and then maintain it over the life is a lot more than you might expect and not really worth it unless you have no alternative.
That being said, if I had to choose between Spree and Solidus personally myself, I would choose Solidus. The caveat on that is that I work as a designer for Stembolt (one of the companies that forked it from Spree) and I've probably got the most intimate understanding of where we're going to take our admin interface in the near future. We have dedicated devs on the project that are quickly and continuously improving security, efficiency and general user experience and I'm genuinely excited about where we're going.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Solidus isn't a brand new project, it's been around as long as Spree because it's built from Spree. Also lot of the Spree extensions can be used with Solidus with minimal or no debugging.
My best advice to you would be to make a list of what you're looking for first, and then you'll be better able to decide what will meet your needs.
We have been developing for a while with Spree and also we have a store that uses it. Spree has help us on many projects. We develop on European projects and we know about the features needed in this part of the world.
About Spree or Solidus, it's not an easy question and we should wait how both communities advance. But I think that there are some initial points of views that could help to decide at this moment.
Solidus is supported by two important retail companies and as far as I know they are looking for easy migration between versions and stability. From my point of view they are working on adding features that are business related needs. As examples they have been working on improving VAT system on Solidus that could help on European projects and propose other features as adding in the future solidus_multi_domain to the core .
About Spree new core team we must let them work and they look also promising, their roadmap looks interesting and they will support rails 5, add store credits to the core, performance improvements and many other things.
Answering the initial question, I think that Solidus its a good option to use and we don't have to forget that they started their project before Spree Commerce had to finish supporting Spree. I like the stability, easy migration path, and new features that they are working on, I find them at this moment more interesting and deeper. We need more features and improve business related needs if we want to compete with other platforms also as every thing evolves the migration path must be as easily as possible.
But as I said at the beginning we have been using spree and also their roadmap is interesting, we will keep using it or evolving actual projects without much worries.
I think that the key question is... Can Spree and Solidus join their efforts somehow and work together?
Hope my thoughts help
Spree is a good technology that we can build shopping cart like applications. But right now they officially down the support. Solidus is working on a fork copy of spree. Solidus is a good choice for upgradation
Solidus working well with good support now. You can refer that.
Related
Is spree suitable for multi/bilingual e-commerce site?
By default it supports internationalization (i18n - http://guides.spreecommerce.com/i18n.html). It gives an impression that spree is bilingual friendly but I'm missing one piece of the puzzle. Translation of product names, descriptions, attributes, categories.
What is your good practice when it comes to translation of products and categories (including metadata)?
gem version: Spree 1.1.1
I work on Spree as the Community Manager.
We are actually having a discussion at the moment regarding the translation of things within Spree using I18n. Most things are translated, but there's still a few spiky edges that you may come across. We're looking to make that easier for people.
Now in regards to the attributes on products, that's possible using a plugin built by one of the guys in the community, Tomasz Stachewicz, and is called spree_globalize. Give it a shot.
For our bilingual spree store http://www.artdesanimaux.com we use spree_multi_lingual with Spree 1.1.2 and it is working properly. Don't know why you say its outdated?
We made a few fixes & added translations for shipping methods on our fork
I need to create an online shop to sell some e-learning services, mostly online courses.
I'm thinking to start with Spree, so I've installed it and I started playing with the configuration, I'm also starting with Ruby and RoR, and I plan to carry out all my next works on this platform that I really like.
I'm just curious to know if it's a good idea to start with a complete solution like Spree to sell this kind of products. I'd need to change some checkout steps, for example there is no need to deliver the things, since they are services (online courses).
Then I'd like to disable the country selection because the ecommerce will just sell in our country and it's useless to allow this selection.
How can I do it?
Then I'd like to allow users to choose between a one-time payment and a recurring billing solution.
Can you help me to understand what I need to do this?
At a first glance it seems a lot of work (beside the fact that I'm new with the framework and with the language -coming from python, php, c++).
I'm using the latest version of spree from their git repo with rails 3.2.3 (ruby 1.9.3 under RVM).
Yes you can modify the checkout steps have a look at http://guides.spreecommerce.com/checkout.html#checkout-customization on how to do this.
On the payments side good luck! I have been struggling with this for a while now and there doesn't seem to be much out there. I will update this if I am able to find anything solid.
If you are new to ruby on rails I would suggest that you take some time to familiarise your self with ruby on rails first before diving into spree as this will save you alot of time in the long run.
if you are running the latest verison of spree(edge) rather then the latest released version please be careful.
Thanks
Ash
What ruby based forum software would you recommend for integration into an existing rails application and allows single sign-on? I have seen many suggestions in posts for forum software that is no longer maintained (2008 and earlier).
Beast is the most current one I know of, and I'm sure it's the one you are referencing.
The rest is more of a side note, but, when I first got into rails, i asked similar questions, aka, what is the best blog, cms, forum, etc to use? As it turns out, the Rails community as a whole is interested in use cases that fit outside the plug-n-play web apps, so most people will end up rolling their own to fit their needs exactly if they find occasion to build such an app in Rails. The good news is that I think that I remember hearing that beast is like 800 lines of code, so it can't been too burdensome to either upgrade out of 2.2ish rails or just copy over the logic you need for your forum.
Thredded is very actively maintained!
Thredded is a Rails engine, so it is very easy to integrate it into an existing app.
http://github.com/radar/rboard
Rboard is really pretty awesome. :)
I always refer to Ruby Toolbox on what the rails comunity prefers.
Here's a good reference http://ruby-toolbox.com/categories/forum_systems.html
Based on the list there are two projects
Rboard - last commit 25 days ago
altered_beast - last commit 12 months ago
I agree with Jed Schneider, in the end most rails guys will roll out their own to fit the exact needs.
Forem and Discourse look promising:
https://github.com/radar/forem
https://github.com/discourse/discourse
I have to develop a online product catalog which will eventually developed into a simple online ordering system, I have never developed a web application before. Please recommend an application framework which might be a good choice for this kind of apps.
Is Ruby on Rails a good choice?
Thanks.
Definitely Ruby on Rails a Good Canditate for developing online e-commerce application , There are many e-commerce application developed in Ruby on Rails , which are successfully running .
Open source e-commerce application spree
Shopify CMS for online store .
Agile web development book has explained the working of rails with an example how to develop a product catalog , which will be more helpful for you.
Many plugins and gems available for payment gateway like the Payment gem .
What more you could need to develop an online store .If your resources are less and the development time should be speedy then rails a good candidate for your requirement.
Finally its your interest and skills set and choose the platform which suits your requirement :)
Hope this helps !
Rails is as a good choice as any other web framework can be.
Here are a few links to help you getting started with it.
The Guides
The Screencasts
The Agile Web Development with Rails book
And for your online ordering feature, you could look at Active Merchant.
Is it necessary to develop it yourself?
There are a number of great drop in solutions for a catalog/shop application. Some offer both the source code for customized deployment, others offer a package including hosting, setup and maintenance. In addition to what's already been mentioned, here are a few more e-commerce solutions that are ready to do.
Keep your hosting solution in mind when deciding how to proceed. A lot more hosts offer PHP than rails.
PHP Based ZenCart (Both)
Django Based Satchmo (Source only)
Rails Shopify (Hosted only)
Do you really want to reinvent the wheel?
If you've never written a web application before do NOT start with something that involves billing. That's a good way to end up in a lot of trouble. Billing is hard to get right, and if you get it wrong you can end up facing huge fines or even in court. In most cases, you have to comply with PCI DSS security standards, and if you fail to do so and information is lost or stolen, you're likely looking at $500,000 in fines.
If you absolutely must do e-commerce, outsource it to PayPal or Google Checkout so that your risk is limited mainly to charging people the wrong amount by accident.
That warning out of the way, Rails is a good place to start if you've never done web development before. It has it's problems, but they'll go unnoticed until you've been working with it for at least two or three years. i.e., they're fairly minor, and are likely to annoy only a very experienced developer with significant project requirements.
Full disclosure: Google is my employer, so obviously I think you should opt for the Google Checkout option.
I was planning on using RoR for an upcoming e-commerce site but keep reading
comments that give the impression that this framework is not yet fit for this type of a commercial application.
What is the state of it? May it be used for large scale online stores etc?
Is compatibility and the frequently changing framework an issue to worry about?
Late answer... but I feel I should share some of the latest stuff available.
Is compatibility and the frequently
changing framework an issue to worry
about?
No. But it sounds like you are a beginner with Rails -- anyone starting a big e-commerce project should consider sticking with a framework they are already comfortable with.
If you definitely want a Rails app and your site is primarily an e-commerce shopping site, I recommend you look at Spree (http://spreecommerce.com/).
If your site is primarily a web application with a small purchasing component, consider using ActiveMerchant directly to hack together your own simple shopping page.
If you are making a primarily e-commerce shopping site, you would do well to at least consider non-Rails solutions. There are so many options for standalone web stores, shopping carts linked to CMS apps like WordPress and Drupal, third-party services for a fee (e.g., Shopify for shops, Chargify for subscription services) and many of them can be customized with minimal coding.
Rails is up to the task, but if you aren't already a "Rails guy" there's no particular reason to choose it for a new e-commerce app.
yes, rails can do it quite well. check out active merchant site, as well as shopify, which is a rails site specifically for ecommerce. as far as changes to the framework, i've found them pretty easy to keep up with on our applications.
Agree with other's posts about activemerchant. That combined with someone like Braintree as the gateway (who are programmer oriented) make it pretty simple to do.
It depends on what features you want in your system.
Chris mentioned some tools for payment processing and order / cart management.
If you want something for a 'large scale online store' then I'm not sure there is anything yet. Specifically when I worked with ATG Dynamo Commerce Server, there was a massive amount of effort invested in their pricing, discount and promotion elements.
Very late to answer but try out http://www.ror-e.com
https://github.com/drhenner/ror_ecommerce
Disclaimer: I wrote it, but it is more developer friendly and starts you off with a lot of best practices baked in. Good luck