Spree as multilingual/bilingual site - ruby-on-rails

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 Don't know why you say its outdated?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

Related

Solidus vs Spree - which should be used?

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.

Ruby on Rails --Spree Ecommerce Using for dance school payments

I am setting up spree ecommerce and would like to use it for parents to pay for classes for their children. How do I add a teacher level to associate to their students? Is there a plugin to have a set up like Udemy so that clients can ask questions of their teachers?
The short answer is no. Spree calls plugins extensions, and the full list of actively maintained extensions can be found here https://spreecommerce.com/extensions
I took a look through and didn't see anything that looked like it would do what you need it to. My experience has taught me that it's usually better to build my own extension anyways so I can tweak it as needed. Here's a link to a tutorial that shows the basics for building your own extension https://guides.spreecommerce.com/developer/extensions_tutorial.html

What is a good shopping cart gem for Rails?

I want to implement basic shopping cart functionality in my Rails app....are there any good gems that will make this process simple?
i.e. I want the shopper to be able to add products and quantities to their checkout, and I want the admin to be able to add new products to the store (and edit/delete existing ones).
Suggestions?
There is a wide range of payment and eCommerce gems covered at Railscasts.
A list of gems can also be found at The Ruby Toolbox and here too.
Also, not covered, you can use the Saas product Shopify
There are few:
https://github.com/spree/spree
Engines, plugins, big, no good i18n
https://github.com/piggybak/piggybak
Engine, plugins, no i18n, new project and still a lot of changes
https://github.com/nimbleshop/nimbleshop
http://www.ror-e.com/
https://github.com/potionfactory/potionstore/
Not an Engine
maybe you can try https://github.com/crowdint/acts_as_shopping_cart
That gem good for simple cart. Maybe you need little modify if you need update cart functionality
The list of a few is good,
and now there is one more engine: RubyClerks
It's small and simple, but all that small businesses needs.
And so it uses much less memory than others.

Adding Spree to an Existing Rails App

I have a rails app that I've built that I would like to add an estore too. My plan was to do it using spree. A few considerations:
I already have a user model, and am using devise for authentication
I want to be able to include related products on various point of the
site (for example, if the user is in the 'cooking' section of the
site, show 'cooking' related products.
I am hosting it on heroku, and I'd like for the store to be at:
http://store.myurl.com
Does anyone have a good jumping off point? I've never worked with spree before, and it seems that most of the documentation is oriented towards people starting an app from scratch with spree. My google searching hasn't yielded too much that is useful.
Can anyone give me tips or point me in the right direction?
Thanks,
I think you may get stuck trying to stick two apps together, particularly if you have two authentication systems running.
I might consider getting Spree up and running first then adding the functionality from your existing app in bit by bit ensuring you 'extend' Spree so upgrades don't break your customisations.
And if you think your custom code may be useful to others you could make it into a Spree plugin.

Are there any application/frameworks/gems/plugins for making a Webshop in Ruby on Rails?

I need to make a very basic international webshop(2 different kind of products) Paying online, basket etc etc.
I am wondering if there are any gems/plugins to help me to make a webshop very very quickly and enough options to modify things in the future.
You can take a look at Substruct and Spree:
http://code.google.com/p/substruct/
http://spreecommerce.com/
Webshop gems describes all of the projects that are tagged with webshop.
Some of the links for Spree are:
A Rails 2 web shop with Spree
Spree

Resources