Spree: Production ready, really?
by Ricardo Yasuda on February 09, 2009 19:06
Posted in English, Programming, Rails, Ruby
Three months ago I wrote about how I helped the Spree project (in Portuguese) with some features. I was developing a store for a client, but we got nothing but headaches. We had 3 stores being developed under Spree, and… none are in production at the moment.
Two were taken down and are being released this week as a Miva Merchant customization, and one has been completely rewritten, still using Rails, ActiveMerchant, ActiveShipping, but without any Spree logic.
Ironically, we had problems using Authorize.net and SSL in production mode with ActiveShipping. Ironically because it was exactly these two features I’ve worked back in November. My boss decided to drop Spree for good and we started over as a Miva Merchant customization.
What we learned from this? Spree is not really production ready, when you have a client constantly asking for changes, features that are fairly common in an e-commerce, but Spree didn’t have. The customization in Spree is far from being easy. Although the extensions system is a really nice idea, the reality is that everything gets really confusing. You never know where is the file you need to change. It totally goes against being DRY and the organization of Rails.
I see that Sean Schofield and several people are constantly developing Spree to make it better, so I wish them good luck. I’ll try to help in everything that’s possible, but for my company, we’ll wait version 1.0 to try it again.
Tags: rails, ruby, spree, e-commerce, english
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Shadow, sorry your Spree experience wasn’t a positive one. Our company has several successful Spree deployments and there are many more coming on line from the other developers in the Spree community. We’re using Authorize.net and SSL without any troubles.
I would agree with you that Spree might still be a bit rough around the edges. Perhaps you will have more luck with Miva, but I personally prefer working with Ruby on Rails for my development. The Ruby on Rails platform itself is still maturing but its an exciting place to be. I feel the same can be said of the Spree platform.
You mentioned that your client was constantly asking for changes. IMO Rails (and Spree) are ideally equipped to deal with such requests. I have already conceded there are some fancy features missing. I guess if you’re client wanted a bunch of things that Spree did not yet have, then Spree was a bad choice for you. If you’re client was not honest with you in the beginning about what they wanted, that’s not really the fault of Spree.
No hard feelings though. We all have a job to do and if you feel that Miva makes your job easier you should use it. That’s what its all about. Hopefully you will be pleasantly surprised about Spree the next time you decide to try it out.
Sean, thank you for taking the time and commenting here.
The reality is that the client was really demanding and asked for things that he thought that ‘every e-commerce site should have’, but unfortunately was not the case of Spree.
I also prefer working RoR, but we have a developer here that is a Miva expert, so the developing time was short. We really wanted to try something new, and Rails based. Too bad it wasn’t enough for our clients.
We started the project using Spree 0.4.1, maybe if we used the current version it would be better now. We’ll continue to try it out, and hopefully a Spree project will go live some day.