Does anyone have recommendations of a headless CMS or a headless ecommerce platform that works well with pinegrow developed sites on the front end?
We want to replace our shopify sites with custom developed sites but don’t want to have to build the entire back end for managing orders etc.
Hi @excede,
Can’t be a lot of help here, but I can give a few thoughts.
Pinegrow handles JavaScript best, but can also deal with PHP. There is some built-in support for Angular. Depending on what tech stack suits you best, I would steer toward a CMS that was language agnostic and then work in either vanilla JS or Angular. Steer away from Ruby and for the moment React. You could also think about PHP. Pinegrow allows easy use of it, but there isn’t an instant preview. There are workarounds for this. I’ll be interested to hear what others have to say.
Cheers,
Bob
Well, a few days ago I created this guide about implementing Snipcart into WordPress using Pinegrow. Even if you don’t use WordPress, I think Snipcart is still worth a look (it simply works with html attributes) as it perfectly resembles the concept of a headless ecommerce system.
I develop my templates in PG, then use a static site generator and the headless CMS CloudCannon. Or if you are Jamstack you could use something like Angular and StoryBlok.
I haven’t used Snipcart but looks good and integrates well into static sites.
Hope that helps.
Thank you. I will look into snipcart, we need something really flexible and powerful. Basically something as powerful as the shopify admin but then a completely custom front end (that can be built in pinegrow with vanilla CSS HTML and JS, no frameworks and definitely no liquid!). We also use woo-commerce wordpress and find it so bad that we could never consider it again.
I think you will be pleased with this post just today;
@excede would love to hear more about what went wrong with WooCommerce. We are considering adding the support for creating WC projects, in a similar way as our WP builder works now.
Woocommerce has to use the wordpress database structure which (as most people know) was originally built as a “blogging platform”. Unfortunately the schema of the database was never created to deal with ecommerce so woo-commerce uses the “posts” as a method of adding additional customer and order related customer information. Instead of a singe row of data holding all the relevant contact or order information, it uses 50-500 rows of data to store something that should literally be in 1-5 rows. As a result, any successful ecommerce store will quickly bloat the database to gigabytes of information making the backend extremely slow for any queries, reporting, updating, any type of data processing. Even on a 16 core 32 GB extremely fast server it is woefully inadequate. For this reason and many others (security, plugin quality, php etc) I personally dislike wordpress and woo-commerce so much that I would never recommend them, they make me want to puke on a daily basis 
@excede
This would be great news.
Woo is good enough for small to medium e-commerce. It is fairly simple and it just works!
One could say the same thing about WP, that it is bloated, slow, and resource hungry, but it just works and that is why a huge chunk of the web is WP powered even if there are 1000 better CMS choices out there. Same for Woo.
When I talk about Pinegrow to my friends one of the first questions I get is …can design woo themes?
Supporting Woo seems like the next natural step of the roadmap for PG.
Just my humble opinion.
Salut
Please! please! please! do!!!
The one thing that drew me towards snipcart was its creative freedom, the one thing that woocommerce severely lacked. Pinegrow adding support for woocommerce would open it up to the same benefit.
Something I’ve been waiting for for quite a while.
Thanks @excede! Being familiar with the WP backend, I fully understand your sentiment 
That said, as @red-rosefields and @roel pointed out, WC is the preferred solution for many, so it makes sense to support it.
I created a dedicated topic for discussing the PG WC integration, please tell us more there: Feedback needed on Pinegrow WooCommerce integration