Online Commerce for Ruby on Rails

Spree News

2009 == The Year of Spree

Posted by Sean Schofield on Jan 02, 2009

Well 2008 has come and gone and its been a good year for the Spree project. The project really started in March 2008. Prior to that it was known as Railscart and was just a rough starting point for something that I was experimenting with. In less then a year Spree has become a legitimate ecommerce platform used by hundreds of Rails developers around the world.

I expect great things from the Spree project in 2009. Several of last year’s major contributors remain active in the project and End Point (my employer) continues to bring in new Spree business. More paying Spree work means more great features for the rest of the community. Spree also continues to be adopted by developers outside of End Point which will lead to many more awesome contributions.

Currently there are two major efforts going on. The first is the order_refactor branch which represents some major changes to how orders are dealt with in the admin interface. The order screen is broken up into multiple tabs and we’re working towards supporting multiple payments and shipments for a single order. Eventually we be adding explicit support for multiple forms of payment (check, money order, coupons, etc.)

The second major refactoring going on is being led by Brian Quinn. Brian is doing a ton of work getting the i18n stuff working with Rails 2.2 (currently this support is being provided by the gloablite plugin.) This work is coming along nicely and Brian is in the final stages of getting all of our tests working again. I should also mention that Edmundo has been quite active as well with lots of patches and some interesting plugins for the Brazilian community.

In 2009 we will continue to emphasize compatibility with the latest Rails releases. That’s easier said then done, however, as Rails moves at a very rapid pace and makes many non trivial changes between releases. The Rails + Merb merger announcement came as a big shock to all of us but I think its a welcome development. We’ll obviously be supporting Rails 3 and beyond.

My open source roots trace back to Apache where inclusiveness and collaboration are the key to running a successful project. Its nice to see the Rails team be more open to alternate view points. This has been my philosophy for running the Spree project all along. If you compare the Spree project to other Rails commerce projects written by one or two people, I think the results speak for themselves.

We will also continue to put a high priority on supporting our localization features. Spree has a very large set of users outside of the U.S. and by accommodating these users we can spread the adoption of Spree and receive some great contributions in return. After the initial Rails 2.2 support is provided, I plan to add many rake tasks for making it easier to keep all of the translations up to date. It should soon be possible to issue simple rake tasks to identify missing content for translation or to jump start a new translation file.

There are also some exciting new features to look forward to in 2009. Full text search is one major feature that I think should be incorporated into the core. Edmundo already has an interesting extension and I look to expand upon this work. We’re also going to slick up the admin interface to make it look more polished. I’m also looking to create a fancy looking demo store to show off what Spree can do. This wouldn’t be part of the core, it would be a separate GitHub project that would also serve as a working example of how Spree can be customized for a specific set of needs. Please contact me if you’re handy with graphics and want to contribute some time and ideas.

Last year was a great start for Spree but this year will be the year the project comes into its own. We’ve got a great community in place and more people discovering the project each day. As the real world deployment base expands we will be getting exciting new features. I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the project so far. Thank you for your ideas, feedback, support, bug reports and (most importantly) your code. I look forward to working together with you this year to make Spree a truly awesome commerce platform. Best of luck to everyone this year in your professional and personal endeavors.

Improved Support For Adding Fields From Your Extensions

Posted by Brian Quinn on Dec 18, 2008

Adding attributes to the Variant and Product models is now supported via the additional_fields class method in the Variant model. The additional_fields method exposes an array of hash objects that contain the configuration for all fields that have been added from all extensions (including core extensions). Each field added to this array automatically gets presented on the relevant add / edit admin interfaces, and this feature should help prevent the need to override these views.

From your extension class you can add to the variant and / or product models by adding a hash for each value, like:

    Variant.additional_fields += [
        {:name => 'Weight', :only => [:variant], :format => "%.2f"},
        {:name => 'Height', :only => [:product], :format => "%.2f"},
        {:name => 'Width', :only => [:product, :variant], :format => "%.2f", :populate => [:line_items]}
      ]

For more information on this new feature please visit the wiki

Goodbye attachment_fu … Hello paperclip

Posted by Sean Schofield on Dec 04, 2008

Spree now uses paperclip to manage its image attachments. Up until this point we had been using the venerable attachment_fu. We were pleased enough with attachment_fu until we discovered that someone had forked Spree in Github and created a patch to use paperclip.

Well we did a little digging and found an interesting blog post. Attachment_fu relies on the mini_magick gem which the Thought Bot folks suspect causes memory issues. When we looked at it we saw the opportunity for one less gem dependency and a slightly cleaner implementation.

Bobby Santiago (bullrico) was kind enough to supply the excellent patch. He’s also made it easy to tweak so that you can upload all sorts of generic assets (not just images.)

Fair warning, the new migrations will totally reorganize your image records and move things around on your filesystem. Product images will be moved from public/images/products to public/assets/products. We’ve tested the migration the best we can but you never know what we might have missed. If you have a lot of real world assets you should back up your filesystem and database before attempting the migration.

New SEO friendly Taxonomy URLs

Posted by Brian Quinn on Dec 03, 2008

Spree now features new SEO friendly URLs for browsing taxnomonies, this feature builds on top of the existing products SEO / permalink functionality to allow browsing products based on their location in a taxonomy. This is helpful for tracking how a user browsed to a particular product (ie. breadcrumbs), considering that products can have more that one taxon associated with it.

So now you can browse taxons using URLs like:

   /t/categories/clothing/
   /t/categories/clothing/shirts/t-shirts/

You can also view products with URLs like:

   /t/categories/clothing/shirts/t-shirts/p/apache-baseball-jersey
   /t/brands/apache/p/apache-baseball-jersey

A new helper method called seo_url(taxon, product) is available in the ProductsHelper to give you the correct URL using a taxon and/or product. You can call the method two ways:

  1. For taxon’s you just need to pass a taxon object:

    seo_url(@tshirt-taxon) #=> /t/categories/clothing/shirts/t-shirts/

  2. For a combined taxon and product URL you pass in both objects:

    seo_url(@apache-taxon, @apache-tshirt) #=> /t/brands/apache/p/apache-baseball-jersey

    seo_url(@clothing-taxon, @apache-tshirt) #=> /t/categories/clothing/p/apache-baseball-jersey

All taxon related customer facing views have been updated to utilize these new URLs / methods.

Spree 0.5.1 Released

Posted by Sean Schofield on Dec 02, 2008

Spree 0.5.1 is a patch release for the previous 0.5.0 version. The primary improvement in this release is that Spree now supports any Rails 2.1.x version (not just Rails 2.1.2). This should help make it easier to deploy Spree on shared hosts or other environments where the programmer may be required to use a specific Rails version. We’ve also fixed the spree command in the gem so that it will now work on systems that have Rails 2.2.2 installed.

Spree does not yet support Rails 2.2.2. This just makes it possible for Spree to coexist on a system with the Rails 2.2.2 gems installed for use in other applications. The other fixes in this release are some minor deprecation issues. If you are not currently experiencing any issues with the 0.5.0 release there is no need to upgrade. The new release just makes it a little bit easier to get a new Spree instance up and running.