The Story
Going back to the roots, Arastta's story begins with Joomla and then in 2012 when OpenCart was converted into a Joomla component (MijoShop) by Miwisoft company, that was our first fork. It quickly took the attention of the whole Joomla community due to its power and marvelous integration with Joomla. In less than 3 years, it surpassed the 10000 users millestone even it was a paid package.
During that journey, we realized that OpenCart is an Open Source but not a Community Driven project. To be more precise, OpenCart was a 1-person Open Source, community payed package which doesn't pay back to the community who contributes and developes for it. The vision for that project was not communicated and feedback from the users was ignored so the community was plunged into darkness. The development was also very slow and buggy. New versions were always breaking down users' stores so the future was hopeless for developers.
We had 7+ years of experience with Joomla, 3+ with OpenCart and 1+ with WordPress as developers so we were able to see what the user, designer and developer wants from a software. After the union with Optimum Theme and intensive work for 3 months, we released the first version of Arastta on May 2015.
The Future
Forking a software is not an easy process but we're not the first ones in the history. Joomla did so with its precursor Mambo and so on WordPress did with b2/cafelog. WordPress has also a good chapter on forking WordPress, forks in general, early WordPress, and the community.
Since our aim is to create a successful Open Source eCommerce project we love to get their feedbacks by bringing them together, providing support them and get their feedbacks.
We're happy that now we have a totally Commuinty Driven eCommerce software, Arastta, may be the first in the world, and you're always welcome to join us.