Messages

[using the 1.2.11 version]

Hello,

I am new to AbanteCart and would like to tell that I am falling in love with it!

I am still building my ecommerce on localhost (xampp/PHP 7.1.33) and using the 1.2.11 version of AbanteCart.

Among things that I especially appreciate is that AbanteCart is lightweight and responsive.
Having the main fields of products being directly editable in batch mode in the backend, without having to access each product individually is how every ecommerce system should be.
The fun things is that I had partly redesigned the backend of another system, and when looking at the product edition in AbanteCart, is is close to what I had designed and coded, with ajaxified fields. So, I really feel comfortable using AbanteCart's backend, almost like if I had written it.
We obviously share the same philosophy.

The backend of an ecommerce system is of uppermost importance, and AbanteCart excels in this regard.
I like the fact that AbanteCart is designed with efficiency of catalogue/product edition/etc. in mind, with a compact laptop-friendly GUI, as opposite to alla moda designs of some other systems that prove being totally unefficient for managing products.
I didn't test the in development version 2.0 yet, but hope that the spirit of Abantecart 1.x remains.

Congratulations and keep on with the good work.

I snubbed AbanteCart for (too) long time, likely because some other carts are mentionned more on Internet, and because AbanteCart looses competition in stupid "Versus" comparisons like "how many themes", "how many extensions", and "which is the most powerful cart".

I am myself a developer with the experience of several shopping cart systems, but also as a merchant.
I have been using MaianPal (formerly MaianCart), CubeCart and others.

Recently I have been giving a try to Prestashop.
For sure, it is a powerful system, but I have found that basic tasks like adding categories and products were slow.
Prestashop database is to my opinion unnecessarily complex (two many tables, two many fields) because almost everything is stored in database. Simple customization may reveal complex in practice.
There are also good things with Prestashop, like its hooking system, but most of the time we don't need all this complexity.

In comparison, by looking at the database and the file hierarchy, AbanteCart appears to me as a better structured project, and I am almost sure I will be able to customize it more easily to match my needs.
So, yes, from what I have seen so far I like AbanteCart very much.

Very often, the size of a community makes more the success of a project that its intrinsic qualities.
Many excellent projects "died" because their communities were too small.
Think how many good CMS were "killed" by Joomla and then Wordpress. Those were/are not necessarily the best CMS but had/have huge number of users.

When developping a new major version "2.0", one risk --as with every fork-- is to split an already small community in two even smaller communities. This may kill a community.

As a developer, I perfectly understand that it is sometimes necessary to give a fresh breeze to a project, but onboarding users of version 1.x to the 2.x will be critically important to not kill the community.