Is Vue Storefront 1 still usable?

Vue Storefront 1 was the first complete PWA released in the Magento open source landscape. I heard about it for the first time at the Reacticon conference in 2018, and I fell madly in love with it.

It had reached a good stability way before PWA Studio thanks to the enthusiastic contribution of the community. Already from its first steps it had all the features necessary to work. And quite well.

The price to pay in terms of technical debt has been high. But it was worth it.

It was immediately adopted by many small and large stores, it was loved and hated at the same time by thousands of developers, it had the credit of bringing Javascript into the Magento world (Let’s face it, the Magento community has always been dominated by PHP developers).

In short, it’s a piece of history.

Although version 2 has already been released which integrates nuxt and it’s more stable and modern, the good old-fashioned Vue Storefront 1 continues to be preferred by many merchants for its simplicity and good developer experience.

If you have a Vue Storefront 1 project nowadays that’s okay it does its job.

But I don’t feel like recommending it for new stores unless they are very small or extremely custom for several reasons:

• Performances. We must be very careful in development not to generate Memory Leaks. Unfortunately it’s almost impossible. Anyone who has a Vsf 1 site knows that every day they will have to optimize, measure, optimize, measure…
• Inheritance. There’s really no good mechanism for inheriting themes and modules
• Compatibility. It uses many deprecated libraries and still Node 12
• Lack of documentation. The old documentation has now been lost, it’s only possible to recover it from Web Archive

In any case a tool is just a tool, and even from legacy software you can come up with an excellent project. Especially if that legacy software is Vue Storefront.

“Sunset Boulevard” Billy Wilder 1950