Last September, I posted about a somewhat odd exchange between myself and the developer of a competing shopping cart plugin, over a troll whom, in the end, wound up attacking both plugins.

Since then, I’ve come across a few negative comments about YAK on various forums — interestingly, in none of these cases has the poster actually contacted me. All too similar to the original troll.

The usual process, when there’s been a real issue with YAK, is that someone lets me know, I fix said issue (or otherwise try to resolve), and release a new version. So far, I’ve only been notified about one legitimate hole in the code (quickly fixed), and (at least, as far as I can recall) haven’t left any major flaws outstanding for great lengths of time. So I haven’t been enormously worried about the odd malcontent.

That said, I occasionally google to see what’s being said out there, and came across the following gem (from the aforementioned plugin developer).

If you want to throw up an image with a price in a page or a post then by all means use YAK. But if you want the real deal then [competing-plugin] is built on years of e-Commerce knowledge and has plenty of important features for people wanting to SELL Online – such as the ability to interface with many payment gateways, the ability to interface with shipping companies, and much much more

(Note: I’ve removed the name of the plugin because I’ve thus far tried to avoid actually naming the individual involved).

This was posted sometime after May last year, but I do feel the need to make a couple of comments, even though it’s almost a year old:

1. What’s your definition of important feature? Get a group of users together, and I guarantee they won’t come up with the same list.
2. YAK now supports a number of payment gateways (PayPal standard, PayPal Pro, Authorize.net and basic Google Checkout integration)
3. Okay, it doesn’t directly interface with shipping companies — but the shipping calculation is relatively flexible, and I’m always open to suggestions.
4. YAK as a project has now been actively (if intermittently) developed for 3 years. So I’d say it also fulfills the assertion: “built on years of e-Commerce knowledge”.

UPDATE: here’s another interesting comment (by someone called Mccormicky) which I came across after posting this:

Yak cart is another you might consider if you don’t mind repairing tables in mysql. I did it and I am no expert.
Yak is not that supported either-there isn’t even an onsite tutorial for setting it up and the readme contains nothing about where to put the hooks! I was amazed.

It looks like fairly obvious trolling, given that (at the time it was posted) there was certainly a basic tutorial for YAK setup, and at the time I don’t recall being contacted about any “table repair” problems. Weird.