The Solidus Blog

The Solidus core team personally recognizes that there are some individuals in the community that contribute regularly to core and would like to recognize those individuals on a more public level. These individuals take the time to contribute back to core, and we as a community are better off because of that.  The first outstanding individual we’d like to publicly thank is Jonathan Rochkind. Jonathan was introduced to Solidus back in December of 2015 when he was hired on at [Friends of the Web](http://friendsoftheweb.com), an iOS and Rails development consultancy. He’s been working with Solidus for less than seven months, but in those seven months has submitted numerous significant [pull requests](https://github.com/solidusio/solidus/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=author%3Ajrochkind) to the [Solidus GitHub repository](https://github.com/solidusio/solidus). The 20 year veteran of web development but has been contributing to various open source projects around the web for the last 10 years and working with Rails for the last seven. His interest in web development led to his first undergrad job at his university’s website back in 1995. About ten years ago he headed back to school for a masters in library and information science degree, and went on to do web development at an academic library. It was at the library that he began developing and contributing back to open source projects like [Blacklight](http://projectblacklight.org), a search front end for [Solr](http://lucene.apache.org/solr/) as well as [traject](https://github.com/traject/traject), a data transformation command line app. In our interview, Jonathan mentioned the amount of support he’s received in the [Solidus Slack channel](http://slack.solidus.io) and the friendly camaraderie of the community as part of the reason he contributes so regularly back to core. He noted, “It’s nice using good tools and being a part of the community that makes those tools better to use.” While he’s not focused on improving any one part of the Solidus platform, his PR’s do tend to lean towards improving backend functionality. “If I run into a Solidus bug that affects one of our apps, I’m going to try to submit the fix back. A local workaround to a Solidus bug is going to make future upgrades of our apps harder, so while submitting the fix back to core is good for the community, it’s also a little self-serving.” In his off hours, Jonathan enjoys playing board games like Settlers of Catan, cooking for friends, and playing the accordion. Contributing to the Solidus project makes it better for the community as a whole and each of the individuals in it. A big heartfelt thanks goes out to Jonathan for the time he’s put into Solidus core. You’re part of what makes this community great. You can find Jonathan on Slack and [GitHub](https://github.com/jrochkind) as jrochkind.

We've released Solidus 1.2.1, 1.1.3, and 1.0.5 to address several security vulnerabilities affecting all versions of Spree and Solidus.

Submitted for your consideration, Solidus 1.2.0. This is a minor release of Solidus, the most major change is the location of the admin navigation, which is now on the left. It also contains many bug fixes and improvements.

We are saddened to announce that Magnus von Koeller will be leaving the Solidus core team. Magnus has left Bonobos and doesn't feel he will have the time at his new job to devote the time and effort needed to the Solidus core team. We would like to extend our thanks to Magnus for his help on getting Solidus up and running over the last year. His guidance and insight have been extremely valuable in getting this project to where it is today. In much brighter news [Thomas von Deyen](https://github.com/tvdeyen) from [magic labs](http://magiclabs.de/) will be joining the team. In addition to his years of experience with Spree, Thomas created and continues to maintain the [AlchemyCMS](https://github.com/AlchemyCMS) project. His knowledge of European commerce and amazing attention to detail has already proven invaluable to the project and we are thrilled to have him on board.

A while ago I posted a GitHub issue and blog post to let the community know that Stembolt was ramping up efforts to improve the Solidus admin UI.

Registrations for SolidusConf 2016 are opening soon! SolidusConf will be held on May 11th and 12th, 2016, in the heart of downtown Toronto, Ontario. The centre and the conference hotel are conveniently located on Bloor Street West and provide easy access to the city’s best restaurants.

Just before Black Friday, a new minor release of Solidus. As this is a minor release, we've done our best to keep compatibility and have added deprecation notices wherever possible.

I'll be working on client sites eventually, but in the meantime I've been getting friendly with the Solidus admin. I already have ideas on improving inconsistent labels, unintuitive interfaces and other future enhancements.

Spree Commerce, the company that has stood behind Spree OSS over the past years, has announced that it will stop investing in the open-source project and that there currently is no core team.

Using an old version of Spree? Admin down right now? You're probably encountering an issue with the alert system. In Spree, requests to the admin "phone home" to `alerts.spreecommerce.com`. Due to changes made to that domain in the last day requests to the admin now hang, never returning a response. Fortunately, there's a quick workaround. Add the following to an initializer and restart your app servers. This will disable alerts entirely. ``` # config/initializers/spree.rb Spree.config do |config| config.check_for_spree_alerts = false end ``` I urge Spree Commerce to move this domain to a static, empty s3 bucket to avoid stores having issues. This system was [removed in Solidus](https://github.com/solidusio/solidus/commit/18c4132161ab3ead5a826270a3c3a11c0546670a) shortly after the fork.

We've released Solidus 1.0.1 to address a major security vulnerability.

We're happy to announce Solidus 1.0.0, an updated fork of Spree 2.4 spearheaded by the developers at Bonobos and FreeRunning Technologies.