Happy to see a developer friendly alternative to WooCommerce!
As said by @1stepforward there are many times you have to deal with a lot of extensions. For me is not just a matter of price but installing 5 extension to get (in the case I’m thinking about) a catalog site is unacceptable.
Everything get slow and complex.
We are indeed colleagues and yes I am potentially part of your target audience so I’m looking forward to seeing this progress.
That’s fine! I’ll work.
There’s not really any way to know how “commercial” the plugin directory (catalog, as you called it) might be. My guess is that most developers (who make an actual living in open source) will release a free version and extend it with paid extensions. It’s a proven model. It’s likely that some plugins will stand out and other developers will even start building their own paid extensions for those plugins. If your plugin is focused on developers, it will most likely go down the same road as Woo – it will take several (or many) paid extensions to get the full functionality users need…and it will cost them. It has to be this way because, otherwise, the plugin will be bloated by trying to meet everyone’s needs.
There are costs to owning, running, and doing business; this is one of them. I get that it’s not easy for new/small businesses to pay for plugins, but, that’s not a good reason to give everything away for free. If I was a Chevy dealer and you showed up with a Kia budget, you’d leave empty-handed. If you wanted a Big Mac and only had enough money for a hamburger, you’d only get the hamburger – they’re not going to add even so much as a slice of cheese if it’s not in the budget. The point is: rather than lamenting the cost of doing business, those who are getting paid to implement sites should build these costs into their quotes and contracts.
Why is this unacceptable? The alternatives seem equally unacceptable:
I’ll also note that “slow and complex” is a generalization. High quality plugins don’t tend to introduce these issues. Sites can run well more than 100 plugins without any performance issues…provided that they’re not using plugins that are poorly designed.
For the initial version we will focus on free plugins, but I agree with you that allowing plugin sales is a good opportunity for us and for our users. It would provide a clear path for ClassicPress to sustain itself, and centralizing this function would also provide a lot of other benefits, like standardized updates and only one copy of any payment-related code on each site.
Yes. I will create this petition myself if needed, after version 2 is out. I think it is a good idea but we make all of the major decisions for ClassicPress based on the community’s needs, not our personal opinions.
That’s not what I said @anon71687268. I don’t and never have expected anything for free. In fact, it was me that suggested some weeks back that a premium version of ClassicPress be considered.
What I did say is that the subscription model adopted by Woocommerce, where they have 70 to 80 plugins developed by themselves with no discount (or incentive) offered for annual renewals, is not something that goes down well with my customers. Hence the reason I always look elsewhere for WC plugins and as a consequence, WC ends up getting nothing. There’s a balance and I personally believe that WC have got it wrong.
Of course, I do always factor these costs into the original quote but instead of offering WC’s own plugins, I offer much more palatable 3rd party ones instead. It’s either that or lose the business. And as a small business myself (freelancer), I can’t afford for that to happen too often.
I was talking about a specific site with particular needs. If WC was more developer friendly I could have written a plugin to handle this.
For slow I’m speaking of number of queries and complex becouse my customer has to go trought about 5 screens to add a new product.
I don’t want to say that those plugin are bad coded, I’m not feel myself able to judge, but some complex operations are unnecessairly repeated many times because of plugin overlapping.
Sorry for my english… and writing from a mobile doesn’t help 