I’m looking at various web site building tutorials for erpNext - particularly those by Linet Sherin Varghese (Frappe Learning). The sandbox I’m using to evaluate erpNext has version 15. I’m not seeing the same menu options she has - so I’m assuming she is using version 14 of erpNext and the web building toolkit has changed for version 15?..or am i completely missing the product integration section? (I could be…)
If this is true are there any v15 tutorials out there? I"m specifically interested in linking products from the ERP database into web pages (like Linet does in her tutorial.) I’m not seeing a products subsection anywhere…
These also brings up the debate I’m having about using erpNext’s web building tools or WordPress. If version 15 of erpNext’s web toolkit doesn’t have easy integration into the ERP’s underlying inventory, manufacturing, etc. what do I get for boxing myself into a very niche CMS tool? WordPress has infinite plugin’s I can utilize plus an army of developers all over the planet. From a support proposition the frappe CMS must clearly offer a low technical entry barrier as well as having enough ‘out of box’ functionality to satisfy 90% of the needs of a small business.
Welcome. In ERPNext15 and frappe you have the menu option called website and within that space you can load up a new website which is hosted at the root of your erp next instance. You can also set up a portal which is just an authenticated portal for users in your organization and customers. You seem to have two requirements - one which is to be able to display the products from within erpnext on the website which you can do through the web form, webpage area (the web form reads the doc type and then makes a web form, these forms are shown on web pages). That part is the easy part.
Your next requirement though is to enable e-commerce functions. This is a little bit trickier because you need to install what was called e-commerce and now called webstore as a separate app on top of eprnext15. The documentation on this workflow is not very good. I have managed to set up a web page with items and allowed someone to check out using the web store app settings but this is not as powerful as say woocommerce on WordPress. I would like to know what frappe is planning to do in the space because this would be area for improvement.
In saying that try what I said above and see if it gets you close to where you want to be.
Wordpress, because Frappe is changing ERPNext right now, and their documentation hasn’t caught up. In addition to that, with big calls to action such as “break up the monolith.” You risk doing a tonn of work and locking yourself into v15 because v16/x will no longer have that critical feature you need to keep your website and workflow intact.
Building in Wordpress and using API/n8n to affect erpnext would probably be less work than trying to do it all in frappe builder/framework.
Your gut has it right. Wordpress is probably a better fit for you.
The website module is part of core Frappe and isn’t tied to ERPNext.
Frappe Builder is built on Frappe, just like ERPNext. So, any changes in ERPNext or other Frappe-based apps won’t impact the data structure or the methods we use to fetch and update data for the website or e-commerce store.
If there are any major updates in the future that change how things work in Frappe or ERPNext, I’m sure they’ll be documented clearly.
Edit: Back to the question: I would definitely recommend using Frappe Builder with ERPNext v15 (and you might want to wait for the v16 Beta release on October 4).
As long as you have some basic code skills (or can effectively prompt GPT/Sonnet), you can do anything with JavaScript via Client Scripts. For data fetching and server-side processing, you can use Data Scripts (Python). You can also handle data submissions through forms.
The final website will likely be cleaner and faster than a WordPress site, with less clutter and fewer performance issues associated with plugins. The design process can be as straightforward as using Elementor.
I highly recommend the “FOSS Frappe Builder” tutorial series; it’s a two-part video set by Build with Hussein on YouTube that covers essential functionalities like fetching and posting data, repeaters, components, forms, design, and more.