thirty bees

You might have noticed I have not been blogging as much lately. Its because we have had our hands full launching a new project. For the last several years we have been discontented with PrestaShop. It hasn’t had any new features introduced, just bugs. Then 1.7 has come along, it does not install on most hosts and it is not near stable. So stable that it has made us rethink our business around PrestaShop.

We are still going to support PrestaShop and PrestaShop site’s, but at the same time we have been developing thirty bees. thirty bees is our answer to PrestaShop’s lack of community involvement and constant problems. The beauty of open source software is that you are free to fork it. What fork is, is when you take the code to do with as you please and release another product. This happens all the time in the open source industry. Mysql was forked into MariaDB, OS Commerce was forked into  CREloaded. Forking is pretty common in the industry.

What we have decided to do is fork the 1.6 version of PrestaShop into a software called thirty bees. There are a variety of reasons we have decided to do this, but the biggest one is our customers. We currently have around 800 active support clients, day in day out we hear the same issues from our clients. We have tried to address these issues with PrestaShop over the years and they have fallen on deaf ears. Us forking PrestaShop is how we feel like we can do right by our clients. We want to give you guys a stable platform. A platform you do not have to buy a module every time you need to add a tracking code. Or have a developer do everything for you.

In the first iteration of thirty bees that launched February 15th we have tried to hit some of the major pain points we have seen with our clients. We have fixed over 2500 bugs in the software, we have added a bunch of new features, and we have drastically improved the speed. These are things that should have happened years ago, but never happened. We have also added some new modules to the core as well. One of them is Stripe for payments. The other is a MailChimp module so you can grow your mailing lists and to better help with marketing efforts.

If you want to lend a hand, add some new features or help improve the code, come over to our GitHub repository and help out. If you want to talk and ask questions about thirty bees and hear our plans come over to our forum and ask some questions. Because we are developing software around what merchants need we have a feature request section as well. If you have any features you would like to see added feel free to come and request some features or look at the current features that have been requested and vote on them.