I’m looking to build an in-house WooCommerce portal (vs. WHMCS). It’s an inhouse project for next week so don’t have to worry about client concerns etc.
I would LOVE to build this with ClassicPress and Classic-Commerce. Tim mentioned in a previous thread that CC is still supported. Planning to add Sumo Subscriptions which I think should be compatible. (I believe you guys had used Sumo before on your donation portal)
To the core and plugin developers here in CP/CC, do you think that is a reasonable goal?
Doable, but I’d suggest going with WC 3.9.5 as a base instead. It might work if its North America-centric only, but as soon as you want to use modern taxation plugins (basically anything that works with the WC tax classes), its going to be difficult.
Eg. using something like Germanized for WooCommerce is gonna fail - but even then, with WC 3.9.x, you need to use an older version of it, because of all the baked-in Gutenborg “goodness” of current plugin versions.
I’m currently administrating a CP 2.x installation with WC 3.9.x for a client, and its running pretty smoothly. Its my own “fork”, which to-date mostly consists of slight adjustments and several backports / fixes.
You need to test a lot which plugins work and which not, esp. with the PayPal integration.
Other generic plugins, like WP Super Cache, only need to be slightly “modified” to work with CP 2.x, ie. changing the “supported” WP version to 4.9 / 5.x, because internally, next to nothing has changed.
Definitely we will not want to be only North American focused. It sounds like it’s best to stay in WP and WC and just disable Gutenberg as we usually do. Albeit I hate the bloat of WC.
there is another commerce plugin that up until some time ago worked with CP. It is Simple catalogue by ImpleCode.
To be noted:
They have a very ugly front-end to their store pages. It needs some loving when designing a site with it.
I reached out to them in the past mentioning CP, they declared that they would not officially support it but that it would continue to work on CP. This was when we were still at v1 however.
It is a complete solution per se to sell every possible thing (products, services, subscriptions, digital products and the like) and also build catalogues. Might be worth to understand if it can be used with CP and what to do for their front-end
What I’m saying is: Use CP 2.x + WooCommerce 3.9.5. That works perfectly well. CC is based on an outdated fork of WooCommerce (3.5 I think), to which a lot of taxation plugins are incompatible.
Havent tested WC past 5.0 on CP 2.x yet, but it might work with newer versions. Havent tested anymore / any further, because the client preferred a working solution over something experimental.
What happened with WC 4 / 5+ and CP 2.0 was (the nightly builds): Frontend all working, but some parts of the admin area not being displayed at all (empty screen with just a sidebar, when there should be statistics etc.).
Also some issues occuring with the selection field in the editor when editing products - which has been solved for CP 2.0.
For a German (laws)-supporting shop system, I’m using an older (fork) version of Germanized for WooCommerce, thats still supported, but not being developed further.
As with any other CP installation, some plugins wont work as expected.
Stuff like WP Super Cache is being developed by Automattic, and has added artifical incompatiblities, ie. the “supported” version. I guess thats some kind of forced push towards “better” WP versions (= v5.0+).
I find such behaviour immature and stupid, but its easy to fix as in: Replace the “Requires at least” version in the plugin comment with “4.9” and be done with it.