
Show HN: Thirty Bees – A PrestaShop 1.6 fork - themaveness
https://thirtybees.com/
======
chrismorgan
Argh! You’ve hijacked the Space key (which is supposed to be for scrolling) to
open your weird, well-hidden navigation!

… admittedly, I wouldn’t have even _found_ the navigation if I hadn’t pressed
Space.

~~~
themaveness
I can own that, it was me. We decided to launch this on Wednesday and I am a
poor designer. I needed something to quickly get up as a page to explain to
people what is going on. So I grabbed a Jekyll theme and went to town. Sorry
about that, I am kind of at fault. Here is the theme I used though,
[http://jekyllthemes.org/themes/space-jekyll-
template/](http://jekyllthemes.org/themes/space-jekyll-template/)

~~~
chrismorgan
Remember mystery meat navigation? This is even worse: _invisible_ navigation.
Hiding the navigation behind a hamburger is OK on mobile because it’s an
established pattern there and the screen is smaller so you perceive the entire
screen readily; but on desktop computers? I didn’t even see the hamburger.

------
zebra9978
where is the github repo ... the github organization ?

there is no link to any source code anywhere. It may be an oversight, or a
hesitation to open it too early. But here at HN, it gives me an uncomfortable
feeling for a cabal that may bait-and-switch.

For example, I have zero idea of whether you are going to use a MIT license or
Apache or whatever. Why is this so secretive ?

We have been looking to throw our weight behind an open community platform
that can compete with magento. Im hoping you guys can be that... but you need
to be open right from day zero.

P.S. oh and I second the ORM comment. Like seriously. It will be a horrible
mistake not to use one.

~~~
themaveness
We have the GH organization created. Its all private for the moment.

Basically we have never forked a software like this before. We are going over
the license and trying to make sure all our i's are dotted and our t's are
crossed so we do not end up in a lawsuit.

The project will totally be open source, it will be under the same license
that the code is currently under OSL 3.0.

We aren't trying to bait and switch I promise. This is something we have been
talking about for a couple of months, but we decided on this week. So when we
open the repo to the public to help with we just want to be in a position we
can defend if it happens to go to court. Nothing kills a good idea faster than
an opening day lawsuit.

We would love it if you guys helped. We need it.

~~~
zebra9978
thank you for clarifying that.

However, I think after reading the comments below that the scope of the
project is to maintain backward compatibility with the agencies/authors of
plugins in the Prestashop ecosystem.

What we were looking for is something that was trying to do new in the webshop
ecosystem. Even I misjudged your "lack of MVC" comment below. My perception
was that you were bringing together a lot of people from the Prestashop
community and building something new with modern day best practices.

Using an ORM is the smallest of them. MVC is another. asset pipeline could
have been a third.

But if you attempt any of this.. you will risk breaking backwards
compatibility with any number of plugins out there. Which is why I'm doubtful
you will try to do anything new. The way I see it is that you will maintain a
bugfixed release of Prestashop 1.6 with incremental changes to support the
plugin ecosystem out there.

Personally, I think you are aiming too low. You want to make something better
than Prestashop 1.7 which is why your holy grail is to maintain backward
compatibility and fix some plugins (like the Paypal one you talk about). But
from what I have seen, your real competition is the Shopify of the world. Even
Magento 2. Not sure if you have seen the docs, but Magento 2 has started
adopting best practices out there:

1\. composer for dependency management -
[http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/install-
gde/prereq/in...](http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/install-
gde/prereq/integrator_install.html#instgde-overview-composer)

2\. database migrations - [http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/install-
gde/install/c...](http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/install-
gde/install/cli/install-cli-subcommands-db.html)

~~~
themaveness
Let me be honest, I am winging a lot of this because you guys are asking great
questions. I think I am either not expressing our plan adequately or it is a
bad plan. I don't know, its late friday night and I have been having a couple
of drinks after a hard week.

We are going to end up rewriting things with better practices. This is
something that HAS to happen. Its not the first thing we are going to do
though. We need to build a userbase in the cheapest, quickest, easiest way
possible. Not having to scrap everything, getting a more stable shop with new
features is attractive to people.

I am purely looking at this from a business sense. Yes, we can take the code,
we can convert it over 6 months to be something totally different, more
robust, better designed, just bad ass code. In that time we can miss the
window and not have as many shops migrate over to our platform. Thats not a
good strategy in my mind. I see great ideas all the time on GH that have been
abandoned because they are not profitable. We are trying to cut a middle line
deal here in the beginning. We want to make a profit to pay for expenses and
we want to give merchants what they want.

Once you have users in a platform it is easier to get them into a big upgrade
than to try to get users from scratch, or get the to migrate. I realize (I
think) you are looking at this from a purely code / application development
stand point. Look at it from a business stand point. Merchants generally look
at two things when evaluating a platform. Is my payment gateway accepted and
are my shipping options accepted. If we break these things out the gate we
will either be stuck writing all of these modules, or we will just lose those
customers. On the other hand if we get them to migrate and have a grand plan
later, the agencies and companies that keep up these modules will rewrite
them. I am trying to mix logical business with logical development to come up
with a successful plan.

~~~
zebra9978
look i understand your struggle. but you will HAVE to make a call. your points
below about "not having to worry about zero days like wordpress" and "not
having an MVC" is incompatible with your statemnt of "we will do bugfixes for
next 6 months and go from there".

I would even go to the extent of questioning any success you think you will
have with the bugfix approach.

Prestashop inc has 9 million USD of funding. Your reason of existence will
vanish the day that Prestashop fixes the few bugs that you have. What do you
think will happen then ? Will you yourself continue on this fork... or will
you say "oh well, the Paypal module works on prestashop 1.7 again"

If you are doing this, then do this for the reason you want to do it
subconsciously - all the MVC stuff you are dreaming about.

>Once you have users in a platform it is easier to get them into a big upgrade
than to try to get users from scratch, or get the to migrate.

There is zero incentive to stay. The advantages of your "new" platform are so
minimal that people will instead make and buy new plugins for 1.7 . In fact
sorry for being blunt, but the existence of your fork is just as long as it
takes for all agencies to port their code to Prestashop 1.7.

If your users migrate, they will force you to never break compatibility. So
you will basically become Prestashop 1.8 . There is no possibility of a grand
plan later.

~~~
themaveness
I really think you are pulling an outsider looking in on this. PrestaShop HAD
9m in funding. It was wasted on deploying a cloud which is being shut down on
Feb 1. It was wasted on a myriad of other things.

As someone that works in depth with PrestaShop, very in depth, I don't think
they can do it. I talk to the founder regularly, I actually emailed him and
let him know we were forking. I believe in that kind of courtesy still.

Let me ask you a simple question that might change your mind about things. How
many developers do you think work on PrestaShop? Currently the company has
about 120 employees. 4. There are 4 core developers. Out of 120 employees 4
developers. I know all of them. I respect them. I don't agree with them
sometimes, but jesus I know they are regular guys in a shitty position.

I think the bug fixing approach will work. Maybe it won't. That is what I am
betting on. Like I mentioned before, I am just one person in a machine being
driven by other people. Sign up to our mailing list. When we release the code
as OS we are going to have a gitter, we can all get in it and air our opinions
and hash out a way forward. I am expressing my ideas not necessarily the ideas
of the project. I will argue my case and if I lose I am going to do what I can
to help the idea that wins. To me this is what being a community is about. We
are working with a product that is under a totalitarian regime I feel. I am
not leading people out of one into another. I am the first to say I don't have
the best ideas. We want more collaboration. We want people from outside the
Prestashop ecosphere to come in and give ideas. In the end these are things
that will help us.

~~~
zebra9978
very well.

could you atleast put up the gitter and allow us to sign up there. mailing
list feels very "commercial"

~~~
aoloe
Hi Zebra, I might be getting old, but your request seems very strange to me.

I have subscribed many mailing lists during my life and there is no single one
that I could define in any way as "commercial".

On the other side, Gitter is a commercial platform that depends on one of two
other commercial platforms (Twitter or Github).

I wonder if I should revide my opinion on the usage of Gitter for free
software projects...

~~~
zebra9978
yes - you should revise your opinion. Thirtybees mailing list is a Mailchimp
signup... not usenet. Please double check.

slack or gitter is atleast a two way street.

------
TonaldDrump
This is great news. I don't know if anyone has been keeping up, but PrestaShop
is being run into the ground. Check out the glassdoor reviews lately,
[https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/PrestaShop-
Reviews-E884065...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/PrestaShop-
Reviews-E884065.htm?sort.sortType=RD&sort.ascending=false&filter.employmentStatus=REGULAR&filter.employmentStatus=PART_TIME&filter.employmentStatus=UNKNOWN)
The management seems like world class screw ups.

Hopefully this will get off the ground, I signed up.

------
pitaa
I wish them luck. I remember several years ago OpenCart was similarly forked
to get away from the project owner's shenanigans, but that fork has had very
little activity in the time since.

------
JaggedJax
I had high hopes for PrestaShop and hope this leads to the improvements the
platform needs. It's so close to being great but it was not particularly
stable and their API is a terrible mess of an afterthought.

I hope they can turn this into a stable and powerful platform that I can
recommend as a self-hosted solution over Magento (too bloated) and WooCommerce
(easy to use, but tied to Wordpress and missing some important features).

~~~
Twirrim
Urgh. It has been several years now since I last had to deal with Magento, and
nothing I've seen over the years suggests it has got any better.

At the time, the final product was arguably a case of code that is far _too_
split up, resulting in quite some system penalties. I get the advantage of
developing that way, but I wonder if they'd have been served better by somehow
writing stuff to combine libraries together for the final releases product.

Even loading the landing page on a default website used to require loading
hundreds of PHP scripts. I was absolutely gobsmacked the metrics I was getting
out of APC.

~~~
chjohasbrouck
> Urgh. It has been several years now since I last had to deal with Magento,
> and nothing I've seen over the years suggests it has got any better.

One of their biggest vendors, WebShopApps, happened to write a pretty scathing
open letter to Magento yesterday if you're interested:

[http://webshopapps.com/blog/2017/01/what-magento-should-
spen...](http://webshopapps.com/blog/2017/01/what-magento-should-spend-some-
of-that-250m-on/)

This is a company that just a year ago was making almost all of its revenue
off of the Magento platform, and they are one of the most-respected brands in
that community. Not a good sign for Magento.

~~~
benmarks
We're nothing if not blessed by a vocal community, many of whom - like Karen -
have their livelihoods as well as the livelihoods of employees to look after.

Karen raises some valid points. Others have raised some additional points as
well as counterpoints:

* Kalen Jordan (Co-host of MageTalk podcast, MageMail.co creator, CommerceHero.io founder): [https://blog.commercehero.io/response-1ee004f6d3c7](https://blog.commercehero.io/response-1ee004f6d3c7)

* Joshua Warren (CEO of Creatuity, a Magento partner agency): [http://www.joshuawarren.com/blog/2017/1/5/magento-2-in-2017-...](http://www.joshuawarren.com/blog/2017/1/5/magento-2-in-2017-hows-things)

* Paul Byrne (President of Razoyo, a non-partner Magento agency): [https://www.razoyo.com/blog/2017/01/07/2017-starts-rage-apol...](https://www.razoyo.com/blog/2017/01/07/2017-starts-rage-apologies-magento-2/)

If anyone reading this thread is curious about Magento in 2017, I recommend to
check them out as well.

------
hardwaresofton
Can anyone suggest a good writeup on the problems with magento and the
existing solutions? I honestly thought storefronts were basically a solved
problem, with options like Shopify, WooCommerce+Wordpress, existing.

~~~
Walf
Have you ever worked with Magento? With 1.8+ I found customisation very
tedious and unpleasant, documentation virtually non-existent, 3rd party code
unreliable, and CMS functionality lacking. Perhaps it's come a long way since
then but I wouldn't bet on it.

~~~
navs
Good bet. Magento 2 isn't any easier to develop for.

As for the CMS, Magento has recently purchased Bluefoot CMS which I take to
mean they are looking at improving the CMS experience, maybe just for
enterprise _sigh_

~~~
benmarks
Stay tuned regarding that.

------
francoisfeugeas
This is an excellent initiative. Can you shoot me an email to discuss how we
can work together (it's on my profile) ? My company used to work with
Prestashop a lot.

------
philtar
What's the difference between an official fork and an unofficial fork?

Watch this project fail in X months because the project owners care more about
publicity than work.

~~~
themaveness
That is a bad thing to say. We need help, its a huge project. Its not just
rewriting a few lines of code, there is a whole infrastructure behind the
software we need help in setting up.

~~~
philtar
Then why say you guys are official and remove credibility from all the other
forks? I know that's not your intention but you used the word official because
"these idiots on the Internet will pay more attention to us"

------
gingerling
FSFE legal network may help you with licencing questions - I have a good
contact there, email me and I will connect you.

------
themaveness
I for one welcome this change. Hopefully they are successful and can fix the
issues that have plagued the software for so long.

------
ebbv
Seems premature to announce like this before you even have a new version to
show. I would think you would make the fork version and say "Here is our
alternative. We have done X, Y and Z. Join us." when you announce.

Anyway best of luck to you.

