I’m a developer, and WooCommerce, in my opinion, is pretty great. Just like Wordpress, if you look at it more like a development framework, is pretty flexible on what it can do. If you’re not a developer and don’t want to touch code, just buy the plugins you need and go from there. Pretty nice compromise tool between flexibility and ease, although if you have a really tiny budget, the plugins can add up.
How does it compare to the developer experience of Shopify? I hated Shopify. Unforgivable that there wasn't even a way to have a dev environment, but this was a few years ago.
I'm also a developer. My job has me work with WordPress almost exclusively. I run hundreds of WordPress sites and the hosting servers that run them.
WordPress is not good, nor is woocommerce. They are, however, convenient to the layperson. That's basically all they have going for them.
WP and Woo are major resource hogs. The data structure is atrocious. There is no ORM and everything is shoved into two tables: posts and postmeta. All your pages, blog posts, products, orders, form submissions, everything is a 'post'.
99% of all plugins are horribly written garbage that are major security vulnerabilities and updates to patch those security holes frequently break everything.
WP sites require frequent maintenance to keep them updated to avoid those security issues and since you never know when an update is going to break the whole site you have to do so carefully and make sure you have lots of backups.
Automattic, the company that makes WooCommerce, is scummy as fuck. Just recently they released an update that added a new cookie which triggered firewalls, and made this new feature on by default. They also are selling all WP.com and Tumblr data to be used for AI. Not to mention the fact they intentionally confuse people into thinking WordPress.com is the same thing as WordPress.org, and since the CEO also controls WP.org they can get away with breaking all the rules of the 501c3 nonprofit's own rules in doing so.
I'd written a plugin for WooCommerce as part of working on a B2B service. It was several years ago now, but from what I remember it seemed quite easy to write plugins for because it just used WordPress's hooks system.
WordPress isn't the fastest codebase around, so you'll probably need to spend more on hosting to get it running well enough, but compared to other PHP e-commerce offerings like Magento it'll fly.
I also came here to say Woocommerce, I helped a small retail store set up their shop. I will say if someone doesn't have ongoing support I could see hiccups appearing eventually if you have any kind of customization. There's just a lot of plugins and things you can tweak. But that ability to customize means you can do something just the way you want it, vs bending a system like Shopify to try to fit edge cases.
I don’t have a favorite one and I love decentralized tech so I forked Lemmy to try and repurpose it for that. Honestky, I would have done it in Haskell or Purescript had the Lemmy devs not gotten as far as they have been with Rust.
It probably can’t have 1:1 feature parity with Shopify (actual commerce being handled on pub/sub would be a nightmare) but I at least intend to broadcast inventory changes using (a variant of) the pub/sub protocol. Instances will theoretically be run by vendors (or alliances of vendors).
I’m at the VERY early stages. I’m currently trying to build Lemmy using nix to declaratively glue together the patchwork they use to build it. I figure having it continuously roll with the original would be helpful for this rapidly evolving pub/sub world.
If that's your hope for static generating, "contact form with backend" goes against those goals. It's an important requirement shifting the entire viability and weighing of platforms and hosters.
I don’t know what you’re doing and what you’re really asking.
It doesn't sound like you read the OP.
You want a static site? Hugo or jekyll.
As I said, I was unable to find a theme that has all the design features of a builder like Squarespace. So to make a professional website with an SSG seems to require coding knowledge.
There are options for contact forms but it will require additional setup.
Yes, I mentioned that. Many of them are limited or costly:
250/mo for free and $8/mo for unlimited with https://web3forms.com/ is the best I've seen so far (besides the completely free one which I'm not sure about).
why would using a cdn I don't control, from a non-contracted 3rd party and their "PageShield" app reduce my supply chain attack risk?
Am I not just increasing the attack surface since now my visitors can be victim not only by my servers being compromised but now also by the 3rd party being compromised?
I don't think you're looking for a registrar, you are looking for some third party DNS server that acknowledges "the domain scam" I guess.
All the major and minor DNS providers rely on the w3 registrar to populate their domain name to IP addresses. So services like hover or GoDaddy will register with the registrar and then DNS services will get your routing info from them.
I'm not aware of any other registrar out there or some DNS service that allows you to submit your own routing info.
And if you're European, participate in the elections in June to get more parties into the EU bodies that will take legislative action against companies like Apple. The EU is the reason Apple is even attempting this silliness because Apple was designated a gatekeeper in the Digital Markets Act: one of the great EU acts for consumers.
A big group of Apple fanbase are not ignorant, rather willing accomplices. Just look at the downvotes here. They will do anything to defend Apple's rogue behavior - like resorting to whataboutery, blaming the EU or even claiming that PWAs are bad.
My theory is that by defending Apple, they're trying to make themselves feel important with their overpriced products.
I will never have a bleeding heart for people who chose to surround themselves in products from that terrible company. They've done anti consumer dealings for decades and have lead the way to other similar companies to follow suit with little to no pushback because of it. Jobs was a terrible human. Tim's no different.
Sweet! Hopefully this can help with the gap I hear from experienced web devs and newer developers that find themselves too dependent on their frameworks.
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