For what it’s worth, I expect this to continue working for a long time.
If the tagline for ClassicPress is that it’s for business, an ecommerce ability would be expected, right? As WooCommerce works now with WP, how about forking it before the merge happens so that it’s in the CP queue. Meanwhile, (1) get a subgroup created for commerce; 2) group would start assessing how many devs are needed to maintain it and start putting out the word; and (3) group would review options on the market already. Giving people options that satisfy their needs is an option that often pleases, right?
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The difference between forking WordPress and Woocommerce, in my opinion, is that there is currently no discontent with Woocommerce. I use Woocommerce on a bunch of websites and am perfectly happy with it.
The new dashboards look great, and my customers would love them.
Even if we were to fork, there would be a lot of potential headache with transferring Woo sites to ClassicCommerce sites.
It’s not an easy problem to solve, and I still don’t know what the answer is.
I’m not following you; I don’t stay up on Woo but will take a look this evening. The reason I’m not following your train of thought is that my understanding from what I read is that the Gut-related merge has not occurred. I did peek at this: WooCommerce Blocks – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org which caused me to ho hum. Back later…
EasternWaWoman he’s saying a) it’d be a huge labor drain to try to fork it and keep it going over time. I tend to agree with that over time, and b) it’d be time-consuming as all get out to maintain, and c) it’s not problematic yet. I don’t get point C, because even though it’s not a problem yet, it clearly will be. If it were to be forked, now would be the time. I certainly don’t see any reason not to keep a version of it around on your Dropbox account, however at the very least.
The nice thing about people storing code on Github is that every single change is recoded. This means that we can go to any specific point in time and fork, so we don’t actually need to fork it right this minute or store it elsewhere as every version will always be available.
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My Two Cents Worth: Find a really good existing eCommerce solution for WordPress that is in the marketing shadow of WooCommerce that would love to become the flagship commerce solution for ClassicPress.
As per “The Innovator’s Dilemma” a smaller shop working with CP could be a big win for them whereas forking WooCommerce means maintaining it In addition to CP, and maybe never having the same level of resources WC has to really compete with WC. If that smaller shop was JigoShop, then the karma would make me smile.
And if there is not an existing one, maybe someone respected in the community would be willing to fork and/or build one in exchange for being the preferred eCommerce plugin?
Again, #jmtcw
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I like this thought process. So our official standpoint would be that we won’t actively attempt to keep ClassicPress compatible with Woocommerce if they make a breaking change.
Lets move this conversation onto who would be the best non-Woo ecommerce solution to reach out to become our recommended solution.
Perhaps we could start by compiling a list of all the options?
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Just my thoughts. The best people to maintain Woocommerce are - Woocommerce.
What if you approached them with the idea of them having a Gutenberg-free version? Maybe they could create a separate version called “Classic Woocommerce”. They could then justify the version by making it a paid plugin, at a nominal cost, which would be a one-off purchase.
It would then be suitable for people using either CP or staying on WP 4.9
Edit: Should have done my homework first. Didn’t realize it was an Automatiic plugin. I’ve never used it myself.
Woocommerce is owned by Automattic / Matt Mullenweg - there’s zero chance they will actively work with us!
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There you go then. The average person using WordPress (like me), doesn’t understand the underlying issues. We read these posts, not knowing why a problem is actually a problem.
I simply thought it was a Gutenberg issue, not an ownership one. It makes sense now, but I wonder how many other visitors have read this thread and don’t know the reason it was created?
I’ll go back in my box now and let you get the thread back on track.
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The “newest” e-commerce plugin that I know of is Ninja Shop.
I put “newest” in inverted commas because it’s actually the latest iteration of what started out as iThemes Exchange. In its original form, it looked nice but had major limitations and iThemes didn’t really know how to develop it. So they sold it to a developer who didn’t really have the resources or marketing nous to take it on.
But now it’s been taken over by the same people who develop Ninja Forms. That’s a team with a strong track record and expertise but who will be working, as @mikeschinkel puts it, in the “marketing shadow” of WooCommerce.
I stress that I haven’t tried the plugin because I don’t currently have any need for it on any sites that I manage, but it might offer us the set of ingredients we are looking for.
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Right now I am working with several clients on their Woocommerce installations and a biggy that is rearing its’ pointy head is the incompatibility between the latest Woo iterations and some of the common addons that make it more than a clunky shopping cart. In general my clients are not updating their Woo past about 4.2.x because it ‘appears’ that the ramp-up to Gutenberg / React for Woo is incremental and it is breaking addons like Store Manager (critical if you have a few thousand products!). Even the Canada Post plugin has become flaky.
As such I have been trying out several alternatives that I will be suggesting to my clients in the next few weeks, notably Prestashop, CubeCart and even the venerable Zen-Cart (which I still have embedded in one of my client sites and purring right along). The carts I have been testing have WP plugins (critical) or integration workarounds (critical alternative), which leads me to a thought. Like Shopify, cart systems such as Prestashop have hosted carts and it would be a good marketing idea for them to create an in house ClassicPress plugin that backends onto their hosting, imho.
If the goal is to port Woo if and when resources become available, why not approach some of these other cart companies to see if there is interest in an ‘official’ plugin for CP in the meantime? Who knows down the road Woo may be simply the cart of WP.com and one of these others the official cart of CP.
Meanwhile it is damned frustrating what is happening to Woo - pretty new front end - crap under the hood.
Mark
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I have been thinking about this some more, and there is really no reason for us to drop support for WooCommerce.
If we find plugins that work with WP 4.9.x but not with ClassicPress, then we will consider this a bug and do what we can to fix it. This applies to WooCommerce too.
I am assuming that regardless of what new features WooCommerce adds, they will keep some kind of compatibility mode with WP 4.9.x, and it will work in this same mode under ClassicPress. (This might mean e.g. shipping their own copy of React and using that if running on WP < 5.0.)
As long as that’s true, then we won’t really have much to do here. If this ever breaks down then there are other options we can consider, like providing a compatibility plugin ourselves.
We can also, independently, look for a plugin that we would recommend as an official or semi-official e-commerce solution. Longer-term I don’t see that approach working for WooCommerce.
My two cents, I can understand why we are focusing on woo, mainly because let’s say all businesses owning an e-commerce in WP use woo… But:
- woo is automattic’s property. If they get to know we aim at making it available and compatible for CP users they will probably “do something” to avoid that. We are competitors.
- woo is stable and reliable in itself, but on its own it needs you to install add-ons even for little things - this makes a mess in the end. I think the add-on route is fine, you can’t have all in the plugin - what is not fine is the plethora of unstable plugins you can add to it (and new ones are developed everyday) and the “lack of control” over that.
- CP needs an e-commerce solution tailored on its own development
Choosing one of the other solutions will pose a big issue: migrate from woo.
That in my opinion is solvable…
I think we don’t need to fork. What we need is to engage a company - let’s say one like jigoshop - and ask them to be our official plugin. We can offer a solid foundation to build on… They can have a freemium model and distribute on our plugin directory. They will have to develop a migration plugin along with the e-commerce solution.
They virtually are going to gain all e-commerce sites that will break due to Gutenberg. And that is a huge number.
I think this would be a win-win avoiding friction with woo…
And I like the idea of giving jigoshop the chance to shine.
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@mikeschinkel glad to hear that.
I volunteer to reach out to jigoshop if we decide for this, I think to get things started they will need to talk with our devs at a certain point however… But as a starting point I can advocate for CP.
Excellent idea Elisabetta!
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I support this as well, if they are open to supporting CP long term. It will depend on that, as we won’t want to be swapping “official” ecommerce solutions every couple of years.
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As I hinted at above, I am not against the idea of reaching out to someone. So don’t take the rest of what I am going to say as any reason not to talk to JigoShop. But I really have my doubts about them.
For a start, their current free version has fewer than 500 installs. For a plugin that’s been around for years, that’s terrible. I know their previous version has 4,000+ but I think it’s significant that they haven’t managed to persuade their users to transition to version 2. That, I think, should tell us something.
We have to ensure that anyone we partner with will enhance – or, at the very least, not diminish – the ClassicPress brand. At the moment, I see two strikes against JigoShop: it’s the plugin “left behind” by WooCommerce, and its users lack the confidence to update to the “latest and greatest” version. Both those points raise significant concerns for me.
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