Hey guys. I'm a Rails dev turned into web shop owner. I recently migrated from shitty Opencart to (also kinda shitty) Spree, but I am getting really frustrated with their development process. They are not merging critical bugfixes for months, but instead they are adding fancy javascript shit while breaking other stuff and releasing "stable" versions which honestly don't even work. It's actually shocking to me cause it looks like a bunch of junior devs having a run at a project they are not up to. The JS frontends they are recommending are a fucking joke to any real web store, pardon my language. It's like a dummy example I could probably whiff up in a couple of days and far from being feature-complete. Anyway, rant off, I am wondering if Solidus might be a better choice for me. I have no desire to go with a full-JS frontend like where Spree is heading. What version of Rails is Solidus currently on, and are there plans to switch to Turbo? How hard would it be for me to migrate from Spree 4.3.1 to Solidus stable (as a senior Rails dev)? Does localization work well (because it's pretty broken with spree & spree_globalize)? In what ways is Solidus "behind" (considering the versioning 3.x, is it a major version behind) in terms of features? Wishlist support? I will be very happy to contribute what I can in the form of PRs, so I think I can bring some good. I've spent the last few weeks patching up Spree to barely work so I kinda need a break and hoping I could be able to migrate in a few days or so - doable? I don't use any extensions except globalize, emails, auth_devise (the standard stuff). To be honest at this point I think I made a mistake to go with Spree instead of Solidus, because I did try both, but I was swayed by the "more popular" gem.

Solidus 2.x is a bit like Spree 3.x, so Solidus is not a major version behind. Migration will depend on whether you have existing data/front-end changes etc. Spree 3.7 -> Solidus 2.0 took about a week, but a lot of that was getting my head around the migration/upgrade process (and finding that Solidus subtlely renamed quite a few tables) but so far after that has been ok

Hey @Jan Brdo. First of all, thanks for sharing your thoughts here. I understand your frustration and I’d like to keep this conversation constructive as much as possible and use your pain point to understand what to do next with the development of Solidus. Solidus is not too different from Spree. Both are platform not ready to go without some effort, both because there’s always some customization to do, and because there are some lacks in their maintanance. But I’d like to talk about Solidus only, because it’s years that I don’t look at what Spree is doing. I can say that for Nebulab, we value making Solidus the Rails ecommerce platform, as much as possible. Providing a starter frontend ready for hotwire is something we have in mind for the future, still not properly prioritized though, so I don’t know when we’ll see it. For i18n/globalize, it should be a first class citizen. I’m working on this PR which would make it available for the latest versions of Solidus. To be honest though, if I had to start today, I’d probably explore some other approaches, like using https://github.com/shioyama/mobility instead of globalize. There’s no solidus plugin for this because, IIRC, it needs postgres (it uses jsonb) and we also support mysql. Happy to intercept all your complaints about the platform, even via DM, it’s a precious feedback for us.

@kennyadsl thanks, the mobility gem looks interesting, I didn't like globalize much to be honest anyway. In my opinion model localization should have been baked into core for a web store platform. On Spree at least, it doesn't even provide an wysiwyg editor for the product description, for example, not sure how it is with Solidus. Definitely want to keep it constructive too, but definitely frustrated with Spree at least. The frontend and backend templates in Solidus look kinda outdated, are there any plans to update those in the future? The Spree ones were sufficient as a starting point for my use (with just a few css tweaks), these look like they'd need a bit more work to get a more modern feel. Also, Solidus doesn't use Turbolinks at the moment on the frontend, right?

for the frontend did you see/use https://github.com/solidusio/solidus_starter_frontend?

@kennyadsl no I didn't. Thanks, I will take a look!