Advanced Sylius-based eCommerce System with Pimcore Integration

The client came to us with the decision to use Sylius as a first step. Next, we looked through our existing plugins to save time during development. It became clear that the solution will need further customizations, but most features are already covered by existing open- and closed-source plugins.

Next, we prepared the first version of Sylius shop with plugins installed and API documentation through Postman examples so the front-end development could be started. It allowed us to find any problems or misconceptions as soon as possible, discuss them, and find proper solutions that we would implement in the future.

• A big part of Planeta Huertos’s marketing is blogging platforms
  They create a lot of content to help their customers decide what they need to buy and how to use these products properly. It is an essential part of their marketing strategy, and the shop needed to be well integrated with the blogging platform. We decided against using WordPress as a part of the solution – we would use our open-source CMS plugin. Still, it needed some customization and new features to fit Planeta Huerto’s needs appropriately.
  We added the possibility to embed product data and link to the shop easily from CMS pages. The CMS plugin started as a simple solution to cover basic blogging needs, so now more features, like publication schedule, had to be added.  After some initial work, it became clear that the CMS plugin will fit Planeta Huerto’s needs (instead of WordPress)  to integrate it with the shop, further adding brand pages with all products from a given brand listed.
• Search is a significant part of any webshop
  The previous solution used a proprietary searching solution. Still, we decided that it will be replaced with Elasticsearch as the main search engine and, at the same time, caching solution for some of the data. It helped improve performance but required some discussion about the structure of indexes to use and some work because our open-source Elasticsearch plugin had to be customized a little bit. ‍
• Webshop doesn’t do all the work by itself
  For example, large eCommerce like Planeta Huerto has other systems to manage their stock, warehouses, and shipment of goods to all their customers – and all those systems had to be connected to a webshop to provide an accurate view of the current state of order.
  Luckily most of their systems used Kafka already, so the only thing we had to do was modify Sylius to provide and react to events sent through Kafka, and this allowed us to integrate correctly. ‍
• It was decided this was the right moment to improve the product information management solution
  Planeta Huerto agreed they will use Pimcore to manage descriptions, images, and other product-related data in both languages, so we customized Pimcore and integrated it with Sylius through Kafka messaging.‍
• Each country has its online payment providers
  We already had a plugin to work with Adyen, which our client uses. For Aplazame, a new one had to be developed to integrate it with Sylius. As a part of the process, we had to ensure both worked properly when integrating through API.