Thread

Anyone tried this out the beta yet? Website seems pretty limited at the moment. What I’d like to see is a set of default example templates I can quickly punch in to see if this works.

PHP (UK) is right about one thing. The sooner I can fire up an e-commerce site and get it rolling, the sooner the money starts coming in. If they can provide a solid enough platform, I don’t think the price is prohibitive for people serious about e-commerce.

Very keen on this solution, but not keen on trying out an incomplete system (with regards to documentation, example templates, bugs etc).

Thanks,
Richard

from the feature matrix you posted above it seems you *really* watered down the Lite version. none of those features are things i would immediately expect from an ecommerce system (apart from SSL)

I’m not sure to make of the above…  you weren’t expecting any of those features to be in eeCommerce Pro, but now that you’re aware of them, you’re complaining that they are not in eeCommerce Lite?

eeCommerce Lite does have a lot of features missing that are present in eeCommerce Pro, but there are a number of reasons for this - we haven’t arbitrarily removed features on a whim.

Firstly, we’ve taken on board all of the comments we’d seen about the price of eeCommerce Pro - and we realised that there still isn’t a GOOD low cost ecommerce solution for ExpressionEngine. So, we created eeCommerce Lite to address that - power to the people.

Secondly, we considered that for eeCommerce to be REALLY successful, it needs support from both EllisLab (who make ExpressionEngine) and also Varien (who make Magento). The way we get support from EllisLab is to follow their module guidelines for making an EllisLab certified module, and get eeCommerce Lite certified - this ultimately leads to more sales for us. Without that, we probably wouldn’t sell enough eeCommerce Lite units for it to be commercially viable for us.

Ofcourse, the problem with getting a module EllisLab certified is that it must be compatible with PHP 4.3. That’s a big issue for us - and not just for us, but for many people. eeCommerce Pro requires PHP 5 due to the built in support PHP 5 offers for SOAP, JSON etc (apart from the correct OO goodness too!). So, we’ve had to create an entirely new codebase for eeCommerce Lite based on PHP 4.3 - the features from eeCommerce Pro that aren’t in eeCommerce Lite aren’t missing - they just haven’t been added into the new codebase.

The features we offer in eeCommerce Lite are a direct result of the PHP 4.3 limitation.

Because of the limited feature set, the price is lower. We *could* offer the SAME feature set (as eeCommerce Pro), but we’d have to charge MORE than eeCommerce Pro because we’d have to spend the engineering time to create the necessary libraries - caching, SOAP, REST, JSON…. these are either standard features in PHP 5 or Zend libraries are available offering these features. If the product costs us more to produce, we have to charge more money for it - it’s simple economics.

If EllisLab would certify a PHP 5 module, that would be different - less time developing means less cost to us and also means we could get eeCommerce Pro certified. This would also mean there would be no separate codebase for eeCommerce Lite - the Lite version would be feature limited by a license, not by the code. In that scenario, it would mean that we’d sell more units (of both eeCommerce Lite and eeCommerce Pro) and could therefore reduce the price of each. Unfortunately - for everybody - at the moment, that’s not a reality. Maybe it’s something that EllisLab should consider… 😉

Regardless, the features not present in eeCommerce Lite are NOT show stoppers - at least, not for the intended customer. eeCommerce Lite is designed for small scale ecommerce - low volumes of transactions, mom and pop stores etc. In these instances most of the features of eeCommerce Pro will just not be necessary - certainly they’d be nice to have, but not necessary. Registration and login synchronisation can still be achieved using eeCommerce Lite - there is still an customer.authenticate tag and a customer.create tag - you just need to be a bit creative with SAEFs. With the extensions in eeCommerce Pro, the extensions hook into the member registration and authentication hooks, so it’s all done automatically for you. There are several solutions that can help with caching, so again it’s not a show stopper - there are solutions available.

At any time you can upgrade from eeCommerce Lite to eeCommerce Pro just by removing your eeCommerce Lite module and installing the eeCommerce Pro module - your templates don’t need to be changed. It will be a 15 minute upgrade process.

Hopefully that has clarified the whole eeCommerce Lite / eeCommerce Pro issue - you can see where we’re coming from with it, why the feature limitations, and the reasoning behind it.

Regards,

Lee Bolding | PHP UK
Programme Manager, eeCommerce

I’m astounded Ellislab would force PHP4 as a pre-requisite for certification.

@Lee,

I think some people are just confused by the feature matrix comparison between lite and pro. For example, I didn’t know you’d still be able to do shared authetication in lite based on what you had in the matrix.

Perhaps a full feature list of EECommerce Pro, Lite, and Mammoth Web Services would be useful. The website doesn’t really explain it all very well. Do they all run with Magento Community edition, or do you need the Enterprise edition for EECommerce Pro?

Trying out your beta requires knowledge of Magento and EE, as well as the time to learn a new, complex module. It limits the number of beta testers available.

Anyway, another problem I foresee is that you are competing with the EE2.0 Limited Beta right now. I’m sure a lot of the community are focused on that at the moment. Many of them the target audience you’d be looking for.

I think some people are just confused by the feature matrix comparison between lite and pro. For example, I didn’t know you’d still be able to do shared authetication in lite based on what you had in the matrix.

Yeah, that feature matrix is really bad in the way it’s presented. I think we probably need to explain exactly what each item on it is in a bit more detail - the SSL one for example is more than just SSL, both products HAVE SSL support, it’s just much more flexible in Pro.

I’ll ask our designer to put together a design for a feature matrix that gives us some way of explaining the features.

Perhaps a full feature list of EECommerce Pro, Lite, and Mammoth Web Services would be useful. The website doesn’t really explain it all very well. Do they all run with Magento Community edition, or do you need the Enterprise edition for EECommerce Pro?

We can do a comparison between Pro and Lite fairly easily, but Mammoth is a completely different animal (pardon the pun) - you NEED to have Mammoth for either product, purely for the reason that without it, there aren’t webservices for authentication, cart, checkout, etc. Mammoth is a product in it’s own right - we expect to see Magento users buying it to enable them to easily integrate with CRM systems such as Salesforce or Sugar, or even other content management systems.

Neither eeCommerce Lite or eeCommerce Pro requires Magento Enterprise.

Trying out your beta requires knowledge of Magento and EE, as well as the time to learn a new, complex module. It limits the number of beta testers available.

Yes, it does… in some ways that’s good, in others it’s bad.

I’m astounded Ellislab would force PHP4 as a pre-requisite for certification.

Me too, PHP4 isn’t even supported by Zend anymore, but it’s right here : http://expressionengine.com/docs/development/guidelines/checklist.html

I’d like to back this up a moment.  PHP (UK) you state:

Secondly, we considered that for eeCommerce to be REALLY successful, it needs support from both EllisLab (who make ExpressionEngine) and also Varien (who make Magento). The way we get support from EllisLab is to follow their module guidelines for making an EllisLab certified module, and get eeCommerce Lite certified - this ultimately leads to more sales for us. Without that, we probably wouldn’t sell enough eeCommerce Lite units for it to be commercially viable for us.

Ofcourse, the problem with getting a module EllisLab certified is that it must be compatible with PHP 4.3.

We have certified only a single module to date - the Tag Module from Solspace.  eeCommerce is not “Certified by EllisLab”.  It may follow the Guidelines (I do not know if it does) but it is not an officially Certified add-on.

I just want to clarify that for future readers. 

As for PHP 4 support being a requirement this has been covered in our blog.

As for the guidelines for third parties, I would consider that to be a minimum standard.  Moving forward, EE itself will not support PHP < 4.3 (1.x still supports down to 4.1).  Your add-on can certainly list a PHP version requirement higher than that, if PHP 4 users are not a market you wish to cater to.

It’s also worth mentioning that just because PHP 5 might ensure that some PHP libraries are available, it doesn’t prevent a developer from having parallel feature sets on servers running PHP 4.  I think ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter are a decent testament to that.  It’s a business decision, not a technology decision.

I’m astounded Ellislab would force PHP4 as a pre-requisite for certification.

Me too, PHP4 isn’t even supported by Zend anymore, but it’s right here : http://expressionengine.com/docs/development/guidelines/checklist.html

You are making it sound like we handed down some mandate which forces you to stay with a php version you’re not comfortable supporting. That’s simply not the case. You never contacted us about php version issues nor about certifying eeCommerce Pro/Lite.

Edited: I believe I have received a couple emails from someone on the eeCommerce team a long time ago, but haven’t heard anything in a long time.

Thanks for clarifying Leslie.

Lisa, that’s an interesting post from Derek - I hadn’t seen that before.

I appreciate the business case that Derek makes in his blog - it makes perfect sense (for EllisLab). For us, with this particular add-on, supporting PHP 4 is not an issue - as Magento already requires PHP 5.

As for the guidelines for third parties, I would consider that to be a minimum standard.  Moving forward, EE itself will not support PHP < 4.3 (1.x still supports down to 4.1).  Your add-on can certainly list a PHP version requirement higher than that, if PHP 4 users are not a market you wish to cater to.

Derek, I’m confused by your comments here… so, for clarification - are you saying that EllisLab would certify a third party add-on that required say, PHP 5.2? or is it still valid to say that you will only certify third party add-ons that will work with PHP 4.3?

Leslie, we’ll be in contact with you regarding certification for eeCommerce when we have completed the necessary changes to follow your guidelines. I expect that we’ll be making a commercial release before we begin the certification process.

Lee Bolding | PHP UK
Programme Manager, eeCommerce

If you have a clearly stated PHP version requirement, it will not automatically disqualify you from participating in the certification program.  And you are reading my article from last year correctly, I’m speaking for us, our business decision, and not expecting to dictate that to other firms and developers.  It’s also worth mentioning that add-on developers don’t have to seek certification in order to sell their products.  As Lisa mentioned, only one add-on is currently certified, and we have no special arrangement for support of the Tag module.  Solspace is still 100% responsible for its use and support of its users.

If you have a clearly stated PHP version requirement, it will not automatically disqualify you from participating in the certification program.  And you are reading my article from last year correctly, I’m speaking for us, our business decision, and not expecting to dictate that to other firms and developers.  It’s also worth mentioning that add-on developers don’t have to seek certification in order to sell their products.  As Lisa mentioned, only one add-on is currently certified, and we have no special arrangement for support of the Tag module.  Solspace is still 100% responsible for its use and support of its users.

Thanks for the clarification Derek, that’s awesome news.

From the comments I’ve seen on Twitter, I think it’s a reasonably common mis-conception that an add-on must support PHP 4.3 to be considered for certification.

I’ll have to discuss with the rest of the team what that means for us - but I think it’s good news for everybody.

Has anyone successfully implemented this beta yet on their EE site? If so, please let us know how it went?

I’m desperate for an example set of templates as the API looks a bit daunting - I’d rather look at some finished stuff - basic things like catalog - shopping cart - checkout.