Symfony2 ecommerce bundles feedback
I'll shortly begin the development of an ecommerce site based on Symfony2. I'll use Symfony2 for those main reasons:
- I happen to know and like this framework
- The customer need is not a typical webstore, so webshops like Magento are probably not relevant - and from my experience I'll finally struggle with them
- The framework seems to have interesting ecommerce building blocks: Sylius bundles and Vespolina bundles
What I am looking for is some feedback about those bundles, preferably from people who run them in production:
- Is there one suite of bundles arguably better than the other (stability, features)?
- Can they be mixed easily? (I saw on a Sylius presentation that some Vespolina bundles could be used within)
- How does the community respond to bug reports, support requests and new features development?
- And anything that can contribute to a comparison between those bundles
And finally, are there some other Symfony2 ecommerce initiatives that I've missed?
Of course I've been doing my research, and I can not seem to find any interesting comparison between those bundles.
About the site:
- Virtual products (songs) are sold
- French site, so VAT rules for France
- Mobile friendly
Answer
TLDR
If you are going to develop an ecommerce website with symfony right now ( as of 2013-05-26 ) and you want to make use of existing bundles/implementations...
Go for Sylius!
Why?
Vespolina
Vespolina has received some attention when first announced as it claimed to be the first ecommerce solution for symfony2 but it's really more or less dead by now.
Even their demo page has only worked for me like 1/4 times. ( tried to add a product to the basket ... 404 )
There is no more active development and the documentation is horrbile. (last commit Sep 2012).
The repositories might still be a valuable source for inspiration in some cases though.
Sylius
Sylius has recently been aquired by KnpLabs. For those who don't know ... KnpLabs runs:
- knpbundles.com ( aka THE definite source for information about available bundles )
- the KnpUniversity ( aka the currently best Screencast provider for symfony2 ).
Ryan Weaver - symfony core member & Lead author of the official Symfony2 doc - is one of the Knp guys.
Those guys definitely know what they do. Their open source contributions are of outstanding quality and their bundles ( KnpMenuBundle, KnpPaginatorBundle, KnpGaufretteBundle ) are widely used throughout the community.
They are driving the Sylius project into the right direction. Development is quite active and there are already sites using Sylius in production. ( i.e. sommelier-prive.de was built with Sylius )