Last days we witnessed many announcements and talks regarding Sellvana, new open source eCommerce platform. The people behind Sellvana are respectable names in e-commerce community, like its co-founder Boris Gurvich better known to developers for Unirgy modules. During the weekend we got access to the repository and I must admit that some of us, including our CEO Tomislav, didn’t sleep for most part of the night 🙂
Installation was a breeze, nice install process is already there even though it’s private alpha. Application requires usual LAMP stack.
First thing I noticed was pure minimalism of the code and structure. I had a feeling that I knew how to build my first module only 2h after initial code inspection. This is something that will most certainly attract many developers. Sellvana uses its own PHP Framework it created, called Fulleron. At this moment, it is a mini framework, used to define structure, mvc logic, events. Database structure is also quite simple, which is a plus.
App has few logical areas, like frontend, admin, cron and api. Each has its entry point, we could say its index.php. System is modular and each functionality is module for itself. Module contains everything required for it to work inside one folder, its models, views, controllers, javascripts, etc. Everything in module is triggered through module main manifest file and main class. Modules can be turned on and off.
Current views (templates) are using twig engine, but from what I saw others are implemented and can be used as well, including pure php. Themes are also modules, which I find quite interesting.
There is usual public folder for web accessible assets and private storage folder for configuration, session, cache log and likes. It’s really easy to figure out where is what, just by the look.
Bootstrap is used to build administration front, which is no surprise, it’s currently best tool for the job.
We could say that main e-commerce functionalities are there, like basic product, cart and checkout, but a lot of them are still missing. You can see some great ideas regarding product functionality, dynamic fields and field sets, product variations, but they’re not quite there yet. I would like to point out that I like the checkout. There is first address step that opens the door to simple one step checkout.
To summarise, I really like application structure and the attempt to keep everything simple. It is interesting to see how trends change in PHP world. There is huge amount of work to be done until we can see this system in beta phase. Core e-commerce features need to be polished and standardised. But knowing who’s behind the project plus great e-commerce community out there, I’m confident it will be an interesting ride. And yes – I guess I will build some module for Sellvana sooner or later.
We won’t post any screenshots for now, since the label said “not for preview”. Sellvana team will do it when they’re ready and we will respect that.
More Info: http://sellvana.com/
