Vue Storefront on production — interview with GoGetGold.com developers
Vue Storefront is getting momentum thanks to the whole Community of Contributors and partners! As first production deployments have been released by our partners, I thought it would be great to hear the stories behind these project.
Today I’m speaking with Mohammed Abdul Hafeez who recently released GoGetGold.com on Vue Storefront.
How did you discover Vue Storefront?
It was very interesting discovery. ust to give you background that we as a family are into Gold Jewellery manufacturing and wholesale business since 25 years. As India is one of the highest Gold consumers in the world where it is common to gift gold during weddings, which can see brides bringing in vast quantities of gold to their new homes, which is considered auspicious. A gift of gold is perhaps the highest form of gifting in the country, and it is not only standard during the wedding but also for engagement, birthday, anniversary, and many more occasions showcasing the value of an individual and purity of intent.
Gold jewelry segment is a huge market in India with the population of roughly 1.3 Billion and out of which 1.1 Billion mobile phones are in use. This year we have a hard target to reach the turnover of 100Kgs per month of Gold Jewellery Manufacturing and selling through the online & wholesale channel as well.
To meet the online sales target, we were searching for a framework for online sales channel solution which has rich feature-set like:
- True PWA methodology, a hybrid of regular web pages (or websites) and a mobile application rendering by taking advantage of modern browsers
- The solution should be highly scalable, reliable and quickest to serve more than Billion mobile phone users mainly targeting India, US, Europe, etc
- The service should respond even at lower internet bandwidth speed or offline
- Taking advantage of unstructured and memory-based storage and queuing systems
I guess it made for me hardly around 3–4 weeks to learn and customize theme while learning Vue.js framework templating and rendering patterns.
While searching and narrowing down the various options for the solution, I came across Vue Storefront and at first glance of architecture diagram I felt and visualized that I found what I want and which speaks my language and serves my purpose. Vue Storefront is one of the reason, I learned “Vue.js framework” and took things forward around it.
GoGetGold.com looks interesting, how much time did it take to create this customized theme?
It did not take much time for me to understand Vue Storefront default theme and come up with the customized theme for GoGetGold.com, I guess it made for me hardly around 3–4 weeks to learn and customize theme while learning Vue.js framework templating and rendering patterns.
Amazing story. Is it connected with Magento2 already?
GoGetGold.com is connected with Magento 2.2.2 (latest version as of date).
How was the process, was it fun or rather a pain?
Totally, it was fun and I enjoyed all of it when shoppers adopting new storefront GoGetGold.com and interacting with storefront usability.
How do you compare development with Vue Storefront to Magento2?
Well, Magento is a great eCommerce CMS framework with rich eCommerce feature set, I am working with Magento framework and customizing it since nearly six years by spending more than 10 hours per day and delivered around 50–60 Magento customization projects under my technology leadership.
On the other hand, Vue Storefront is an entirely different approach, and an exciting initiative can take advantage apart of headless Magento2. It’s true PWA methodology, off-line ready, browser service-workers & database, and rendering content through virtual DOM and more interestingly it is powered by Vue.js, one can port in the huge collection of Vue.js plugins/implementations into Vue Storefront.
Good point. Components and Framework structure are key. You’re one of the contributors to the core — Google Analytics Support is there for your effort! How it’s to be an open source contributor?
Well, by the time GoGetGold.com was in production, Google Analytics feature was not implemented in Vue Storefront and I thought of giving a try and built the Google Analytics feature with the help of vue-analytics plugin. Most interesting thing and what I like is Vue Storefront community-engineering team and their support, without their guidance, it would have not possible for me for this contribution.
Was it easy to start with the first PR?
I felt pretty easy to take the first PR as having very decent amount of documentation in place and slack channel always available for communication and exchanging implementation ideas through. I would like to suggest and plan for a set up of Vue Storefront community-engineering forum portal.
How your plans look like for working with Vue Storefront?
Vue Storefront is a great initiative and would expect more like others do from it and it’s community-engineering and contributing back to make Vue Storefront more efficient, secure and scalable.
I am planning to work on some of the exciting stuff on my list as of now related to:
- Deeper SEO and Social Media integration stuff
- Maximum coverage of advanced Magento 2 Rest API
- Bringing in more features of Vue.js advanced virtual DOM rendering, SSR, etc
- High Availability and Scaling Vue Storefront by implementing Docker container in swarm mode for multi-node Express and load balancing, Elasticsearch cluster, etc
- Securing and scaling Kue and Redis
Thanks! It was really interesting speaking to you Abdul!
If you like to share your story related to Vue Storefront just drop me an e-mail to contributors@vuestorefront.io!
Mohammed Abdul Hafeez — Head of Technology — Ecommerce / DevOps at Kensium Solutions. Core contributor to Vue Storefront project and creator of GoGetGold.com — production grade implementation of VS
