The Solidus Blog

We're proud to announce that this year SolidusConf will be held in Salt Lake City. Join us on October 21-24th for four days chock full of Solidus.

Solidus v2.9 is now available! Thanks to all contributors, testers, and users who made this release possible. This version's support will end in 18 months: 2021-01-16.

There's a lot of history behind Solidus, and long-time users already have a good understanding of who is behind and cares for the platform and its future. We know this is not enough: we want to empower developers and businesses with all the information they need to evaluate Solidus as the foundation for their store. That's why we have just published a document explaining our governance model. The power of Solidus lies in the diversity of its community and the passion they put into improving the software. These individuals and companies are the ones that design the future of Solidus every day. They are freelancers, consultancies, retailers, open-source enthusiasts or simply aficionados. They have different skills, interests and responsibilities. Without further ado, let’s see all the players in the Solidus game! ### Project Director At present, [Nebulab](https://www.nebulab.com) is the main code contributor and director of Solidus. They provide technical guidance and coordinate community efforts and activities. ### Core Team The Core Team is a group of individuals who are committed to maintaining the project from a technical perspective for the long term. Their main goal is to continuously deliver value to the community through their work and the work of all contributors. Here are some of the tasks they are responsible for: - implementing new features; - identifying and fixing bugs; - triaging issues; - reviewing and merging pull requests; - providing support via Slack and other channels; - improving the documentation; - providing technical feedback and guidance to contributors; - coordinating the work of contributors; - maintaining the code, documentation, and tools. ### Donors Like many open source projects, Solidus lives thanks to the donations of our amazing community. In order to be completely transparent towards the community, we chose Open Collective as our platform for collecting and spending donations. This helps us keep the project running while at the same time keeping you informed on the latest developments and how your money is being spent. If you're an agency, being a donor also entitles you to become a Solidus partner. If you're interested, head over to the [Partners](/partners) page on our website to learn more about partners. ### Stakeholders Stakeholders are members of the Solidus community who have a strong interest in the future of Solidus. This group includes retailers, agencies and long-term friends of the project. They coordinate and contribute to Solidus usually in non-technical ways, for instance by choosing what conferences to attend or organize, by identifying marketing opportunities or by deciding how to use the funds in Open Collective. ## Future-proof governance This structure is what makes Solidus unique. We love it because it allows us to hear all the voices in the community when making decisions. In case one of the entities involved can no longer take care of the project, the governance structure can be reshaped to guarantee Solidus’ survival. If you want to know more, take a look at the full [GOVERNANCE document](https://github.com/solidusio/solidus/blob/main/GOVERNANCE.md) published on our GitHub repository.

Hello, Solidus Community! For those who missed it, our new Partners page and the related Partner Program are out!

Today, we’re delighted to announce a new Solidus core team member: Andrea Longhi (spaghettic0de on Github) from Nebulab!

Are you going to RailsConf 2019 in Minneapolis? So are we! We’ve scheduled a Birds of a Feather session for Solidus users at RailsConf - if you’d like to meet some of the people who use, work on, and love Solidus, you should stop by and say hello.

Announcing Solidus 2.8.0! Thanks to all contributors, testers, and users who made this release possible.

Canadian digital agency Stembolt was acquired late July by Juul Labs. Stembolt formally announced the acquisition earlier this year prior to Southeast Solidus. This has created a gap in leadership of Solidus. **We’re proud to announce that from December onward, Solidus is joining the growing list of open and sustainable communities partnering with [OpenCollective](https://opencollective.com/solidus).** We understand that many in the community may have been feeling unsure regarding the future of Solidus. Solidus and its community have always been strong. Through the strength of the community, a group of concerned individuals was formed. This group is inclusive of many retailers, agencies and long-term members of the community. Everyone in this group is deeply invested in the success of Solidus. Over many weeks we determined what we feel was the best path for the future of Solidus and have unanimously decided that Solidus should become an OpenCollective project. Since the beginning Solidus has enjoyed a vibrant and engaging community, we are happy to guarantee that this will continue, in addition, this paves the way for: - Continued maintenance - Adding new features - Security patches when required - Framework improvements - Future conferences - Securing the future of Solidus as a leading open source e-commerce framework. ##How You Can Help **While we are excited about this development, we are still looking for help from the community.** In an effort to facilitate this new direction, we are seeking: - A full-time contributor - Contributions to the platform and the #support channel - [Financial support](https://opencollective.com/solidus) - Case studies from Solidus retailers Thank you for your continued support, Solidus Stakeholders

You may have noticed that we rolled out a brand new look and feel to Solidus.io last month. We wanted a new site that better communicates Solidus' strengths as a platform. We hope that you agree that the new branding is more meaningful than what the old site offered.

We left technical conversations off the table when we posted the Solidus community roadmap. Now in this post, we'd like to focus on them. We'll discuss specific technical accomplishments and plans for Solidus 2.4 and 2.5 from a very technical perspective.

Previously, Solidus didn't have an explicit maintenance policy for previous versions. We're very security conscious, so for each previous security release we've released a patch simultaneously for all previous minor versions. As we've released more versions, this has become more difficult. Our last set of security patches (December 2017) required 10 new releases, which is way too many. However we don't want to surprise users by announcing an issue with no easy patch available to them. To allow us to patch security issues promptly, and to make sure developers know how long their Solidus version will receive security updates, we're introducing the following End of Life policy: Solidus versions will receive security patches for 18 months following their initial release. Versions which would hit their EOL before May 5th, 2018 (4 months from the date of this announcement) will receive security patches until May 5th, 2018. This applies to Solidus 1.0 through 2.0. Under this policy, versions will be supported until the following dates:  

Since we forked Spree three years ago, we’ve been heads down, working through the project's technical direction. We’re very proud of our technical progress over the last three years and have a concrete plan for continued success.