Not everyone agrees with what and how PrestaShop is doing, so it makes sense that forks were created for this e-commerce platform.
What is PrestaShop fork? Open-source products like PrestaShop can be modified by anyone as long as you respect licensing terms (not removing brand name, copyright, or author names from the code). Because it is open-source, communities can create code duplicates and modify them – those are “forks”.
In this article, we will learn about some good/bad PrestaShop forks to explore:
- Thirty Bees PrestaShop Fork
- Great Things About Thirty Bees PrestaShop Fork
- Biggest Issues Around Thirty Bees PrestaShop Fork
- Should You Use Thirty Bees PrestaShop Fork
- Other PrestaShop Forks To Consider
- Conclusion
Thirty Bees PrestaShop Fork
The number one most popular PrestaShop fork is thirty bees. Agency created this fork after they got annoyed by the speed and focus shift of the PrestaShop company.
It is a very successful PrestaShop fork, but it has its advantages and disadvantages.
Great Things About Thirty Bees PrestaShop Fork
This fork started with PrestaShop 1.6 version and released a few significant changes that PrestaShop was unable to:
- Responsive design (admin is browsable by the mobile device)
- Speed optimizations in lots of places
- Cloud hosting
- Multi-store support
- Some SEO improvements
- Cleaner admin interface
They started in 2017 and have been very competitive when comparing features to the official PrestaShop version.
But in 5 years, I think the official PrestaShop has backported almost all features from the extensive 500+ features list they advertise.
Biggest Issues Around Thirty Bees PrestaShop Fork
Thirty Bees fork is still PrestaShop v1.6 with some backported features from v1.7. However, for me, there are a few significant issues with this fork you can’t simply avoid.
User Interface. If you log into the back office, you would see PrestaShop v1.6 with just some changed colors. Only minor design details were improved overall. This is where PrestaShop v1.7 has its advantage – the admin interface is responsive, faster, and with lots of user experience tweaks.
Addons. There are a dozen reports about addons not working on Thirty Bees. And this is not a good thing if you are thinking of purchasing some add-ons. In that case, you might run into an issue that the addon is incompatible (mostly because it is still the old PrestaShop v1.6).
Themes. It is hard to find a good theme for PrestaShop, but it is almost impossible to find it for the Thirty Bees fork. But most pieces for v1.6 probably would work.
Should You Use Thirty Bees PrestaShop Fork
No.
A few years ago, in 2018-2020, I recommended customers to give it a try. Still, I think that the current version of this fork is not something that you would name as a better alternative to PrestaShop v1.7:
Thirty Bees won’t be upgraded to PrestaShop v1.7 or v1.8. PrestaShop v1.7 has tons of features and things fixed that were present in the fork. All new add-ons and themes won’t be compatible with Thirty Bees as PrestaShop is trying to kill the v1.6 popularity. Thirty Bees is too small to outplay PrestaShop’s latest version
Thirty Bees is no longer in active development:
While PrestaShop is always in an active contribution state:
Other PrestaShop Forks To Consider
There are 4200+ PrestaShop source code forks.
Unfortunately, I could not spot any maintainer with an active contribution or lots of changes added to the source.
Conclusion
After looking into some PrestaShop forks, my decision is straightforward – just use the latest PrestaShop v1.7 version and constantly update.
More great ideas you can find in PrestaShop blog.