Reflections on Reviewing WordPress Shopping Cart Solutions Today
It sounds mundane, but within the WordPress community it’s almost the height for excitement this year: The tension between Jigoshop and WooCommerce, two competing shopping cart solutions for the venerable platform that’s got people all fired up — and not just over the feature-set.
What happened was, Jigoshop and WooThemes (the famous custom theme maker behind WooCommerce) were both working on that holy grail of WordPress plugins, a robust eCommerce system comparable to industry standards like Zen Cart and Magento, when WooThemes decided to “fork” Jigoshop’s project. That means WooThemes basically took Jigoshop’s creation and modified it, releasing it as their own creation. Sounds bad? Well, actually, such forking is entirely the whole point of being open source.
You see, WordPress has to be open source. You can’t legally make software for WordPress without making the source code visible for one and all — both to see for inspiration and to use in any which way whatsoever. The point of such an arrangement is to benefit the end-user, valuing user rights over that of the creators, in complete contradiction to the motivation behind copyright laws (hence the term “copyleft” in the open-source community). Instead of trade secrets, best practices are freely aired for the greater good of all. WordPress itself operates on such premises, which is why it’s so powerful, having attracted the volunteerism of many a talented programmer worldwide through the years, attracted by its open nature to improve not for the sake of money and market share but simply because.
You see, the more competition there is when it comes to ideas, the more people in general tend to benefit. Thus, a great idea — a great way of achieving something in code — will proliferate, leading to better software standards. And so WooThemes was able to take Jigoshop’s code and use it to craft their own vision of what a WordPress shopping cart ought to look like, how it ought to function.
But as that vision is quite similar to Jigoshop’s, there’s been a lot of soreness in the WordPress community. In fact, WooThemes even managed to hire two leading developers of Jigshop away!
That’s why reviewing WordPress shopping cart solutions today is so interesting. There’s a lot of foment in the community (a lot froth, too — often at the mouth!), and this is a good thing since great things are afoot at last where eCommerce is concerned. WooCommerce and, by extension, Jigoshop, has the potential to be a real game-changer. By all initial accounts the two plugins are quite robust, with the power to one day serve at an enterprise-level of online retailing. Yet there is also the probability that forking will split the development community, resulting in duplicated effort and, even, abandonware in the end.
Right now everything’s too much in flux to discern where it’s all heading. Suffice it to say, however, next year looks set up to be quite interesting! For one thing, the entrance of WooCommerce/Jigoshop into the under-served WordPress eCommerce market is likely to cause a flurry of development among the established shopping cart providers, and the community is almost certain to see a lot of creativity and movement once more.