New shop, should I use 1.9 or 2.0?

Hi,

We'll be starting work on a new shop in a few weeks, but have already started looking at the code for 1.9.

My question is; should we begin our work on 1.9, or is the 2.0 version stable enough to work with?

The release for the site will be around august and by then I hope 2.0 is released.
This means that either way when we go live we will end up with 2.0.

We can't say that 2.0 version is stable enough because it's not released yet. Hence you just can't use it. It'll be released in June-July 2011.

So even though we never have used nopCommerce you would suggest it would be better to invest the time to make the changes we need in 1.9 and then upgrade?

Since you're moving to mvc(and we haven't used it at all) I thought it might be better to try to learn that and deal with the instabilities with 2.0 instead of investing time into 1.9.

I'm not sure how much changes we need to do, but at the very least integrate the web shop to an existing erp system and of course the layout of the shop.

nopCommerce will be rewritten from scratch. There'll be BETA, RC for 2.00 first. Personally I would better start working with 1.90 and upgrade when 2.0 RTM is released.

v 2.0 is MVC,

oops should study MVC THEN

How transferable is knowledge from 1.9 to 2.0? I am in a very similar position starting with a new company whose site won't be up for several months. I asked myself the same question and have come to the same conclusion about using 1.9 for now.

I am familiar with the general e-commerce systems, but I am concerned if I invest in learning nopCommerce as it exists today, am I going to throw all that knowledge away when migrating to 2.0? Statements like "rewritten from scratch" raise flags and make me hesitant to dive in too deep.

Hi,

This discussion might be helpful for you: https://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/t/6696/developer-roadmap-1-moving-to-mvc-your-thoughts.aspx

It was informative, even if mostly a debate over the merits of WebForms, MVC, and Silverlight. Statements such as this one from Andrei:
"There're also a lot of other major changes planned for nopCommerce 2.00 - repostority layer, persistence-ignorant entities, code-first approach, unit tests."

make me think that there won't be a lot of the code base that remains the same. It sounds like the database structure and user-visible features will probably be close to 1.9, but the rest will likely not share much. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

It's a shame I'm not starting this project six months from now. Then I'd feel better about jumping into the 2.x branch and running with it. For now, it looks like my best option is 1.9 and try not to invest too much into it in the short term.

icrf wrote:
You're absolutely right.

Thank you for the confirmation. I'll try to tread lightly in the near future.

I am less concerned with staying up to date with technology and more concerned with scalability and any potential improvements that would come with a move to MVC. Every store owner wants to be prepared for the day they have huge numbers of products and users, and my employer is no different.