Title Background Image

Near Future Plans


What Merchant’s Edition is working on right now.

Merchant’s Edition also works on a couple of tasks. Read here what this is.

By Markus “Traumflug” Hitter
Featured Image
Photo by Pixabay.

What we’re already working on

Next to providing services to shop owners, which is the main purpose of Merchant’s Edition, we also work on improving the software. Tooling for providing better services as well as improvements to the software its self.

Better tools for safe debugging

With limited debugging capabilities typically found on production servers it’s a pretty risky strategy to just hack away. Often developers need to insert debugging code to find out this or that. Such debugging code can easily get forgotten later. Sometimes one even forgets what the original code was.

Current solution is to make a full backup. This often takes many hours if not days, lots of work (we of course don’t bill).

Having a tool for making backups automatically and only of the files actually touched should help greatly to improve response times and reduce time to task completion.

Communications infrastructure

Communications is key for a good customer experience. Currently Merchant’s Edition is pretty limited on this.

Planned is a secure and encrypted chat and perhaps a forum. This way secure exchange of hidden addresses and passwords will be possible without hassle.

Performance measurement tools

Trying to improve performance without reliable ways to measure that performance is just stepping in the dark. There are tools like Profiling Mode already, but these are pretty inaccurate.

A first step towards an accurate tool was described at Traumflug’s. Plan is to extend this.

Actually improving performance

Given there are accurate measurement tools, one can start to hunt down bottlenecks and time consuming execution of unnecessary code. Core code was forked from PrestaShop 1.6 a few years ago and is far from perfect in this regard.

Faster loading times ahead!

Design tweaking module

thirty bees’ default themes are great, but they’re customizable by experts, only. Solutions for changing (S)CSS right from within the browser exist, just not for thirty bees.

Imagine changing colors, border sizes and similar stuff by just a few clicks in the browser!

Benefits for Merchants

The above will have quite a number of benefits for Merchants:

  • Support by developers which have shown their talents by writing revolutionary modules like Core Updater and doing the rounding audit.
  • Easy access to development services, including direct contact to the developer.
  • Impressively short completion times for smaller tasks.
  • Safe forwarding of secrets like back office or FTP access to developers.
  • Identification and removal of performance bottlenecks in your shop installation.
  • Ability to tweak the appearance of your shop yourself, without a need to become a CSS expert.

This should be enough for the near future. Let’s go to work!