themaveness

No it doesn't. That is trademarked and up for renewal around the same time. But it can be extended where a patent cannot. https://www.quora.com/When-does-Amazons-One-Click-IP-expire

Imagine the scenario, a user lands on the AMP page and a user lands on a responsive page. Both have a question about shipping time. The AMP user has to navigate to a contact form to ask, then submit. The responsive user can just ask in the chat window on the page.

I don't think its that. Its that AMP is borderline an anti-trust. But the point is, even with the speed and possible ranking boost, does it boost conversions? More traffic without conversions generally does not help an e-commerce site.

I imagine it will likely be shelved soon either by lawsuit or just by Google's closing it down.

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.

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.

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/

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.

A simplified version of the roadmap is this. We are going to fix bugs and stabilize the platform where people can sell without having daily bug fixes.

After that we are going to pool our knowledge, resources, and community to figure out the path forward. I will be totally honest with you, I am half developer half CSR person. I hear what my clients want and I try to make it happen. I am not the only person in on this though. I am one of many and very flexible. We are going to do a rewrite after we have stabilized things and we are going to do it right. We are going to look at the options out there and figure out where to go.

At this point it looks like I am leading things. I am the reluctant leader. I am the guy that realizes that my ideas might not be the best ideas and I want to hear yours. I just feel in the beginning it is about stabilizing what is there. I think if we spent 6 months rewriting everything we would lose an important window.

Tonight I am actually setting up the feature voting for our site. This is how I think things with a community need to be handled. There are going to be nay-sayers that stifle things because they are new and unfamiliar. This is always going to happen. But if we are transparent and add features by simple voting then no one can really argue with the logic. I have my ideas, but I am not the arbitrator of what will be included. I really want this to be a community project. I want the merchants and the developers to speak what they want and I want to make something that reflects the ideas of both.

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.

I understand it, but look at it from this point of view. PrestaShop 1.7 requires everyone to purchase new themes and modules. The code base is extremely messed up.

We are taking the PrestaShop 1.6 codebase that has 10k modules and 2k themes as a fork. If we go changing the database handling off the bat we are going to lose the compatibility that might make us successful. We aren't a project starting from scratch with unencumbered code. We need to maintain compatibility to be successful in the beginning. We are springboarding basically. You are wanting us to take the springboard away and just jump.

I get it, but honestly it is not in the immediate roadmap. Its really not something that people in the scale we are in are worried with.

We are not. We are actually spread out all around the world. Right now we are not a company, we are just agencies / developers that mad, sick and tired, and want something better. We just started this project this week and we are pulling more and more agencies on board, it is exploding under us.

About the Paypal. For me personally that is a reason we are forking. Last year the company that develops the Paypal module for PrestaShop got into an affiliate fee dispute with Paypal. They released an "update" of the Paypal module that basically made every UK shop's module disappear on the checkout for customer. People in the UK had a shit fit. I mean who releases an updated module that is meant to punish users to prove a point to Paypal? Totally unacceptable.

I find it missing a lot of things personally. Its just a mash of plugins from different sources that have not been evaluated or secured. The package itself is pretty light, because it does not have the features of other actual ecommerce packages. You have to use plugins that were not made for ecommerce packages to extend it.

A good case in point is most dedicated ecommerce platforms have one thing in common. User login and admin login is handled by a totally different system. This is a security feature. At the same time, most platforms support multiple sites or shops out of the box. Woo supports it with a plugin that was never made for ecommerce.

The lack of an MVC ... I digress. Wordpress is awesome for blogs. For something that takes money and has liability I don't want to have to read 0-day lists every day and see if I need to comment out something or update. Its counter productive to business.

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