Aimeos – Ultra-Fast E-Commerce for TYPO3

Thanks to Norbert from Aimeos for sharing!

The Aimeos Open Source Project has been noticed by many people who are or were looking for a shop solution for TYPO3 - shown by the download numbers of the Aimeos extension in the TYPO3 Extension Repository (TER). But what’s behind the project and what makes it so special?

In October 2014, the first version 1.3.0 of the Aimeos TYPO3 extension was released in the TER. That was already a stable release, but where have the previous versions gone? For that, you have to take a closer look at the development history and how Aimeos is structured.

Although the extension is based on Extbase and uses the full TYPO3 infrastructure, there is one big difference: instead of using Extbase repositories, the "Aimeos Core", a set of composer-based PHP libraries, provides the data structures and logic for a complete shop system. The TYPO3 extension uses this library to implement about 20 different plugins, which contain e.g. list and detail views or the checkout process.

This library and its data structures are highly optimized and extremely flexible. This not only makes them extraordinarily fast and scalable, but they can also be adapted to almost any complex requirement without having to extend the data structures for new data types. This is particularly important for complex business-to-business (B2B) applications. If you want to get an idea of it yourself, take a look at the Aimeos TYPO3 shop demo.

Since 2012 the library is available as Open Source, at that time under a different name. After it became clear that it would not be developed any further by the company who started the project, a group of developers from the community decided to continue it using the name "Aimeos". Since then, both the distribution and the Aimeos community have grown rapidly.

The TYPO3 extension is also not the only frontend based on the Aimeos Core. The fact that the library provides PHP objects and methods for the complete e-commerce logic makes their native use in every PHP project possible, resulting in integrations for Laravel, Symfony, SlimPHP and Flow that stimulate each other, because a new feature benefits all.

Recently the Aimeos GmbH, which helps TYPO3 agencies with implementing shop projects as a service provider, presented the project #gigacommerce. By using ElasticSearch as a backend for the complete product data, it is now possible to implement online shops with 1 billion and more articles based on Aimeos and TYPO3 - and with response times of 125-250ms. You can find out more about #gigacommerce and the TYPO3 demo at the Aimeos #gigacommerce page.