The sad news is Spree is no longer going to be maintained. I’ve used it recently and found it’s feature set amazing but also found it sluggish to work with.
My time with spree has been like my time with Active Admin - so much out of the box but difficult to customize without fear of an update breaking things.
With Active Admin I constantly felt a simpler, less dsl and more explicit approach to admin frameworks was needed and lo and behold Thoughbot released just that with Adminstrate.
It’s made me wonder if like Administrate there’s an alternative approach to be had with ecommerce open source? What if we took the best parts of Spree and deliberately avoiding backwards compatibility created an entire new project? What would it look like?
I’ve learnt a ton on Upcase and thought it might make an interesting conversation and chance to at least theoretically apply some of our new knowledge to a real world example. Who knows it could lead to some contributions to the Spree successor, Solidus.
Where have you heard about spree not being maintained anymore? I thought it was a great project.
I’ve only had a chance to work on a spree project and this was like 3 years ago. My experience was similar to what you’re describing - you get a lot for free but changing behaviour takes quite some effort. I also didn’t like deface though I understand exactly the problem it is trying to solve.
For others reading this post I want to share a link to another e-commerce project. You’ve already mentioned solidus but there is another one I’ve found recently called shoppe. Maybe someone finds it to be interesting.
My apologies I got my lines crossed a little. It’ been a while since I read their original announcement.
Spree employees are moving onto other stuff. Some may continue to suppport it in their spare time. It’s likely to go into maintenance mode but who will be maintaining it isnt’t clear and the post doesn’t sound optimistic about it lacking a core team and vision however.
Yes deface I found to be difficult and would sometimes lead to “Hey where is that HTML gone?” moments. I understand what problem it’s trying to solve but wonder if there’s another way to solve it.
I also think the views have a bit to much logic in them making them hard to read and perhaps brittle. I wonder if this is something using view objects such as facades or cells would help to keep the inner internals of an objects such as orders hidden from the view template.
I have looked at shoppe a while back. I’ll take another look at it.
One of the reasons I made the switch to Ruby on Rails is that I want to be in charge of my own code and only implement the code that I need in my projects. I just finished a tutorial on Tuts+ called Building a Store With a Payment Gateway in Rails
I liked it because it explains exactly how a core e-commerce solution works. It’s less complex than one would think. Basically all you need is a product, an order, order-item and user object.
Looks like a good tutorial and thanks for your code. I too prefer to write my own code too but sadly for reguarly creating stores which needs to provide products, variants, tax calculations, coupons and shipping etc would be too time consuming.
