Throwing In The Towel With Cs-Cart Addon Development

All,
After much consideration, I've decided to discontinue development of cs-cart addons. I didn't make this decision hastily, the primary issue is with addon maintenance. Maintenance was becoming overwhelming, to say the least.
Usually when products upgrade to tenths (4.4 to 4.5) there are mostly bug fixes. With CS-Cart, when you all upgrade to tenths its as if its an entire new version of the software (4.4 to 6.0). Your structural changes with each version release is just unbearable. I remember when you all withdrew support for Reoccurring Payments/Billing and although it was complete insanity, I decided to stay the course with my development, this was a severe lapse in judgement. The drastic changes never ceased.
I have a line of plugins for wordpress and I hardly ever have to touch them, EVER, except for deprecated functions. You all dont deprecate...you all eradicate features and functionality and put up documentation about what you hammered.
For these reasons, I've unfortunately decided to no longer support CS-Cart addon development. The addons I have in your marketplace now wont be upgraded. The cost is higher than the return.
I truly hope you all start remembering that clients are communicating with the CS-Cart API and making massive structural changes to your code will eventually be your very undoing with developers and perhaps even front-end customers who buy themes...and then the themes no longer work or need to be patched...oops no...thats a developer issue isn't?
So sad...I hope you all see this as constructive criticism and not the ramblings of a disgruntled customer. You have a great product but the development team needs to build more modularly...right now there is very little OOP...just a bunch of scripts communicating with each other and thats part of your problem and why your staff is always swamped. Naming a directory "controllers" does not mean its MVC compliant. Please remember OOP save the world.
Thank you for the experience

You said it! I absolutely love cs-cart, if they could "fix" this they'd have the best cart on the market!

Seems like Simtech is starting to corner the add on market.

Seems like Simtech is starting to corner the add on market.

Simtech is not cheap but they have by far the best customer service and sales team who acts like they are doing real business. You can be sure they will respond back to your emails and deliver on time. If they are becoming successful by doing these, I wouldn't call it cornering the market. They are filling a gap that was not filled by other teams.

Well if I may add I have also had very good experiences with the people from eCom Labs, CSCartRocks and a few others. Hungryweb is doing great work also as does Fotis from DVS.gr and not forget Tony B. (ez-ms.com) but the latter ones suffer from what I believe to be some what of a disadvantage as they are all third party developers as in the sense that they are not offsprings of Simtech the parent company of CS Cart which is an advantage by itself, also the higher tax burden for the latter ones (US and Europe).

I plan to stay with CS Cart as long as the trend is still going the right direction. PS that is just my take on things.

In general I have no real bad experience with anyone of the developers, small and large. I just consult eCom Labs a lot more. PS I do not have shares in that company (LOL).

I stopped developing production addons (stil happy to do custom) for precisely the same reasons as above. I've eliminated a few products but continue to maintain the vast majority. As a sole proprietor, I invest in doing a good job to deliver the added functionality desired. I use proper practices and have had to invent my own along the way because the system support wasn't available at the time (like updating language variables for an addon without having to uninstall/install). I've also invested in my own licensing and distribution system which enables me to update addons without customers having to do anything other than install the initial software. All of this investment was done because of the lack of system support for the same.

I maintain my code base and fix defects pretty quickly when reported. My automated distribution allows me to get those in the hands of my customers quickly and reliably. But I don't have the resources (nor the market) to allow me to redevelop the same addons with no added customer value because some developer at cs-cart decided to change something unimportant to meet their latest desire (use of TWIG as an experiment in the email editor as an example without offering any support for addon products).

Lags in things like store_import show that even for cs-cart internal development, changes to maintain existing products are challenging.

Extending a product is significantly different than breaking existing addons for changes that add absolutely no value to the customers.

I'm not sure what "tax burden" is being referred to given there is no tax in Oregon and even if there was, it would only apply to an Oregon customer.

I continue to support my products and my consulting clients (customized addons). I believe we offer some people the services they want. We are not the cheapest but we offer superior quality and communication to meeting your business needs. I work most weekends and usually respond to inquiries in real time. You don't have to wait till the next day to get a response and two days more to ask another question and get another response.

I'll be around as long as I can keep my head above water, but if current trends continue, then I'll be forced to move along to a different platform or possibly a different market.


I'm not sure what "tax burden" is being referred to given there is no tax in Oregon and even if there was, it would only apply to an Oregon customer.

I was and I am referring to the tax burden in terms of inflation, over regulation to small business and high income taxation.

All that may also contribute to the fact that developing new addons hurt the oppertunity to yield a profit.

I sure hope things change for the better and that smaller outlets like Tony's EZ-MS.com will stay in with the community.

All,
After much consideration, I've decided to discontinue development of cs-cart addons. I didn't make this decision hastily, the primary issue is with addon maintenance. Maintenance was becoming overwhelming, to say the least.
Usually when products upgrade to tenths (4.4 to 4.5) there are mostly bug fixes. With CS-Cart, when you all upgrade to tenths its as if its an entire new version of the software (4.4 to 6.0). Your structural changes with each version release is just unbearable. I remember when you all withdrew support for Reoccurring Payments/Billing and although it was complete insanity, I decided to stay the course with my development, this was a severe lapse in judgement. The drastic changes never ceased.
I have a line of plugins for wordpress and I hardly ever have to touch them, EVER, except for deprecated functions. You all dont deprecate...you all eradicate features and functionality and put up documentation about what you hammered.
For these reasons, I've unfortunately decided to no longer support CS-Cart addon development. The addons I have in your marketplace now wont be upgraded. The cost is higher than the return.
I truly hope you all start remembering that clients are communicating with the CS-Cart API and making massive structural changes to your code will eventually be your very undoing with developers and perhaps even front-end customers who buy themes...and then the themes no longer work or need to be patched...oops no...thats a developer issue isn't?
So sad...I hope you all see this as constructive criticism and not the ramblings of a disgruntled customer. You have a great product but the development team needs to build more modularly...right now there is very little OOP...just a bunch of scripts communicating with each other and thats part of your problem and why your staff is always swamped. Naming a directory "controllers" does not mean its MVC compliant. Please remember OOP save the world.
Thank you for the experience

thesoftwarepeople, thank you for the feedback.

First of all let me explain what is tenth versions " to tenths (4.4 to 4.5)" mean: "it's a minor release when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner" see http://semver.org/

Since v4.3 we moved to semantic versioning. So 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 is release with new features on board. Whereas patch release is a version when no new features introduced, and contains only bug fixes. In other words there are no changes in product behaviour.

For a year we write tech instructions on all changes done in the product, e.g.: http://docs.cs-cart.com/4.6.x/developer_guide/addons/compatibility/adapting_452_to_461.html. We spent quite a few efforts trying to make each minor backward compatible, and make sure hooks work exactly as they expected to. Testers have instructions on making sure no 3rd party add-ons will be broken with these changes.

And I would like to get right to the tech details about "making massive structural changes to your code". Can you please let me know about such changes?

Well if I may add I have also had very good experiences with the people from eCom Labs, CSCartRocks and a few others. Hungryweb is doing great work also as does Fotis from DVS.gr and not forget Tony B. (ez-ms.com) but the latter ones suffer from what I believe to be some what of a disadvantage as they are all third party developers as in the sense that they are not offsprings of Simtech the parent company of CS Cart which is an advantage by itself, also the higher tax burden for the latter ones (US and Europe).

I share the same experience. I didn't mean to pick and choose certain companies over others. I had very good experience with eCom-Labs, they follow through to make sure I get good results so I'm definitely sticking with them. Vali @ Hungryweb did great job for me before so all in all, I share the same experience with many companies you mentioned in your list.