Improve flexibility and modularity: Hardcoded dependencies and missing ecommerce essentials

[inishantthakur]

Hi team 👋

First of all, thank you for building Tomato Ecommerce and the Tomato ecosystem. I'm exploring it for a Laravel + Filament PHP ecommerce project and wanted to share some important feedback and concerns that could improve the plugin's flexibility and adoption.

Issues Observed

1. Hardcoded Language Options
   Many components across Tomato plugins (e.g., Tomato CMS and Tomato Ecommerce) have languages hardcoded to en and ar. This becomes restrictive for projects targeting other languages or dynamic translation setups.
   ➡️ Ideally, language options should be derived from the app configuration or made customizable.

2. Tightly Coupled Category Resource
   To use product categories, Tomato Ecommerce relies on Tomato CMS's Category Resource in the Filament Panel. This tight coupling can be problematic:

Projects using only Ecommerce shouldn't be required to install/configure Tomato CMS.

There should be an independent or abstracted way to handle ecommerce-specific categories (e.g., product departments).

3. Brands Implementation Incomplete
   The ProductResource references brands, but there's no dedicated Brand model or resource. I can find traces of brand data being stored in product_meta, which feels like a workaround.
   ➡️ Given that brands, categories/departments, and attributes are core to almost every ecommerce system, it would be great to treat them as first-class citizens.

Suggestions for Improvement
Decouple shared entities like Categories, Brands, and Tags into a more flexible structure or shared plugin.

Support dynamic language configuration throughout all Tomato plugins.

Provide a clear structure and roadmap for handling ecommerce essentials like:

Product departments/categories

Brands

Attributes / Variants

Filters

Translations

Question: Future Roadmap?
Is there an official roadmap or direction you’re following for the Tomato Ecommerce plugin? I would love to contribute or align with it if it's being actively maintained and expanded. The plugin has great potential with Filament PHP, and a bit more abstraction/flexibility could make it truly production-ready for broader use cases.

Thanks again for your hard work and for open-sourcing these tools 🙏

[linear]

TOT-194 Improve flexibility and modularity: Hardcoded dependencies and missing ecommerce essentials