Is a subscription to Cartalyst worth it?

Although I am not answering the question I am intrigued about the value of cartalyst subscription. I've read read about the system and seen some nice screens on Twitter but last I saw the next big version was being finalized.

I did use a a nice user system from them called sentry2 for L4 but Not since . Looking forward to the responses.

I've been using Cartalyst packages for about a year now. I personally think they are great and worth every penny.

They are not really their own framework, more a collection of packages that are commonly used for apps. The joy of using them is that you are backed up by a team of experienced devs who fix any bugs and progress the packages even further. For us, it feels like we have a larger team of devs.

One offering is Platform which is a base CMS form which to expand on. It doesn't limit you at all. In fairness, there are similar open source CMS options. Again, for us, the fact that you are paying for these packages fills us with more confidence - if there are bugs, they need and do fix them - which saves a ton of time. Also, you can rest assured the code is sound. I'm not knocking the open source options here, but I feel that response times to support is that much faster because Cartalyst have a responsibility.

You can rapidly put together an 'extension' to Platform in a matter of mins. It's insane how quickly you can create custom elements to the system. If you haven't seen them, checkout their videos at https://vimeo.com/catalyst. Some are a little out of date, but you get the idea of what you can do.

So really, it depends on you requirements. You can source similar packages that are open source. You can build your own base CMS. If you are a single dev or a small team, Cartalsyt packages will save you hours upon hours of time and money.

I'm not affiliated in anyway - just a huge fan. The packages are agnostic, so you could use them away from Laravel if you ever wanted - with the exception of Platform I believe - which has been built for Laravel.

Anyway, I would watch the videos mentioned above and take a look and see what you get - in terms of Platform at least. I personally highly reccomend the packages.

Sorry. I posted the wrong URL to the videos. https://vimeo.com/cartalyst

Can seem to edit the post on my iPad.

The biggest problem with Catalyst is a perhaps lack of tutorials and examples to follow. Their technical documentation is good but theres not much of clear path in for new users. If you are an experienced Laraval dev then you can probably pick up Cartalyst's packages and run with them, but I would caution against trying to learn Cartalyst's stuff and Laravel at the same time. Catalysts docs assume you know Laravel. The Cartalyst videos are excellent in themselves, but are too few ( and some are long out of date ) to provide an overview and guide into the whole system.

Totally worth it. I made over 30 projects with Cartalyst Platform. Last versions of platform are very handy. T2thec posted very detailed description.

Convinced my employer to sign up for a 3-month subscription. 1-week in and the support has been very proactive, helpful and friendly. The packages looks great.

Convince your boss to break the bank and spend $75 finding out. Maybe a college/Uni could strike a deal.

Hello there,

I am a Cartalyst Subscriber.

In my opinion, the packages are absolutely amazing. They are saving me a lot of time on every project. Like @T2thec pointed out, there are many free packages out there or you can build your own. But here is what I think: How much time would you spend to build your "base CMS"? 1 Month? 6 Months? To build a CMS like Platform, it would take me years and I wouldn't ever achieve such a good "platform" as a base for every project.

Another advantage is that they are improving their packages constantly. So, I can work on my projects and don't have to worry about the base cms, user authentification, billing, data grid (or whatever Cartalyst package I am using).

The third point is their support. I can not remember how many times I didn't understand or missed something and the support always helped me to solve my problems. Super friendly, super reliable and super quick.

And my final and most important point is that I became a better programer/developer by using Cartalyst's packages. Of course, a basic understanding of Laravel and PHP is needed in order to get started. But don't be afraid of the packages. Use Laracasts to get a basic understanding and then learn from Cartalyst's packages. At least, that's what I did and am still doing. And I am getting better every time I try to understand how the packages are working. Discovering their great and well thought code base is like having a mentor who is teaching you their knowledge. So I am very grateful to have a company like Cartalyst and to be able to learn from them. Worth every penny!

Or let's look at this from another point of view. I charge my client 75 $ for 1 hour (depending on where you are located). Subscription paid. Working without the packages and trying to do everything by myself, countless hours, never going to be paid for that^^.

Regards from Switerland.

@eminiarts word! And by the way: 79$ ? This is nothing .. It is just a one hour Dev Rate. And for 79$ you get hundreds of hours for awesome Packages and Support :)

My predecessor found Cartalyst, so I can't take credit for the sound decision to subscribe.

We've had a multi-developer subscription for about a year and I must agree that it's worth every penny. I'm not in any way affiliated; I'm just a very satisfied subscriber.

In our particular case, the most compelling arguments to be made in its favor are:

1.) The product is excellent.

I've learned more about Laravel from reading Cartalyst's code than I have from reading any book or following any tutorial. The code is as well-written as any I've seen. Many large, popular products have horrible, unsightly code hidden under the hood. After nearly a year with Cartalyst, I haven't seen a single line of code that made me shake my head.

I have the most experience with Platform and Sentinel (the non-FOSS successor to Sentry), which I consider to be Cartalyst's "flagship" packages. These two packages, coupled with the auxiliary components that contribute to their make-up, have thus far been sufficient for all of our application development needs (and we are a sizable corporate enterprise). These two packages alone provide content management, robust authentication, role-based authorization, a theme engine with asset-queuing and complete template and asset inheritance (with fallbacks), and more. Extremely powerful.

2.) The entire product-line is designed with extensibility at the forefront.

It's of utmost importance that we're able to override functionality to suit our specific needs. Platform is especially powerful in this regard because of its Extension system. Platform provides a GUI-driven tool for spawning new Extensions, which makes them effortless to create and configure. Each Extension is a mini-Laravel installation, which is portable, self-contained, and features dependency-management (one Extension can require another, for example), and allows the developer to override quite literally any aspect of the base application's behavior -- including logic, templates, assets, localization strings... they've thought of everything.

3.) The support is top-notch. Cartalyst is extremely responsive to support inquiries, bugs/issues, and Pull Requests on GitHub.

Support is not limited to clarifying finer points of the documentation; they never let themselves off easy. If the team can't solve your problem off-the-cuff (and they usually do), the developers will roll-up their sleeves and dig into your code, which is unprecedented in my experience. Even when it's "operator error", Cartalyst will show you where you've gone wrong, make the necessary changes, and return your code in working condition. Now that's support.

As somebody who has opened many bug reports of varying severity, I've been rather impressed with Cartalyst's ability to fix issues and tag the corresponding releases quickly.

4.) Cartalyst worries about semantic versioning, release tagging, release cycles, etc., so I don't have to.

Anybody who has ever had to manage a large, non-private code-base knows all too well the monumental effort required. Laravel's refusal to follow semantic versioning thus far has made the job even more cumbersome, yet the Cartalyst team ensures that its code is released in lockstep with changes in Laravel and that there are no "upstream surprises". Offloading this responsibility to Cartalyst has been worth the cost alone.

5.) The cost is incredibly reasonable and effortless to justify to management.

Cartalyst should (and probably will) charge more in the future. I have to assume that the current rate is "introductory" and designed to build the user-base. Even if the cost doubled, we wouldn't hesitate.

Given that the subscription costs as little as an hour of one's billable time each month, the support alone will pay for the subscription in a matter of days. It's all too easy to waste several non-billable hours struggling with some snag that the Cartalyst team would be able to address quickly and expertly.

6.) The private Gitter chat channel.

I've learned as much from the Gitter chat channel as I have from any other learning aid. There is a social aspect to the chat channel that makes learning Cartalyst fun. There is a sense of companionship, camaraderie, and mutual best-interest that fosters creativity and productivity. Inevitably, somebody in that chat channel has the answer (and oftentimes it's another subscriber, not even a Cartalyst staff-member).

7.) The license is fair and reasonable.

The ability to continue operating websites that are built upon Cartalyst components in the event that we terminate the relationship for any reason is imperative to our company. The licensing terms allow for this and are entirely reasonable in every other respect. Many organizations take this ability for granted when dealing with proprietary software licenses.

All of that said, the other assessments in this thread are fair and accurate. The documentation is good, but it does lag behind the code-base. But, I would rather have mature code with decent documentation than young, poorly-vetted code with exceptional documentation. My understanding is that they are fully-aware of the need for more tutorials, more walk-throughs, and more examples in the manual, and are working diligently to meet that need.

Knowledge worth acquiring is difficult to obtain. The learning curve is quite steep, and as davernz noted, trying to learn Laravel and Cartalyst's packages at the same time is a considerable undertaking. As someone who did precisely that, it took me several months of 8-hour days to feel like I could more or less build anything I might need (and I'm a senior developer with over 10 years of full-time development experience, mostly in PHP). But once your skills are dialed-in, the sky is the limit.

Hello, I took your advise on and purchased a subscription. Sure enough it seems to be a very nice well thought Platform. However, the lack of example and tutorials is a big problem as I am wasting too much time trying to figure out where things are and how they work/how can I add one my needs.

I mean Laravel is free but has lots of tutorials and doc that help you get going and understand it, even you have wonderful videos to show you lots of things. On the other hand, the paid subscription from catalyst does not have much doc/tuts event the videos are outdated!

My whole idea of using cartalyst is to save me time not to spend more time to figure things out myself :)

I am not trying to leave a bad review as the structure of Catalyst seems to be very good starting point.

I will update this ticket on my experience with this app in couple of weeks to see how far I get with it.

Thank you all

I see many of their packages are for their 'Platform 2'. Do you know how many of the packages where written specifically for Laravel? @cbj4074

@csuarez For example Sentinel, Cart, Sentinel Addons like Social etc., Data-Grid, Alert, ,Attributes, Converter and so on :) Just take look at the packages.

If its for Platform, its described in the Package description :)

Most all of the platform specific packages are based on framework independent libraries/packages, pretty much all the functionality can be used framework independent if you take the time to put it all together.

i c. I'll give them a try. thanks guys

I wonder if it would be possible for Jeffrey to collaborate with Cartalyst and produce some tutorials for them? That could be awesome!

I think Jeffrey usually builds stuff from the ground up himself just so he can have more control over it and understand his system better.

The support is there when a developer like myself doesn't read the documents thoroughly or thinks a bug has been produced. I was pleasantly surprised by the professionalism and response time by the Cartalyst team. I want to focus on developing agnostic apps and cartalyst seems to be the best foundation for wiring these things together in a way that makes sense.

I am a little skeptical of reusing such large systems of code as a foundation, but the reality is I cannot write this stuff from scratch. In the effort to create a system that can be scaled and delivers abilities like content management, ecommerce, and extensibility without being constrained to "Opencart" coding practice, molding two different OS platforms together to deliver good functionality, or having to bow to Magento I have found this.... Open source, well documented, patterned framework that should let me deliver mid-business tools at small business prices. Feeling hopeful.... :)