The Solidus Blog

We have two new Solidus versions: Solidus 2.0.1 and Solidus 2.1.0.rc1. Solidus 2.0.1 contains only a small fix to support the upcoming Ruby 2.4.0, which Matz usually carefully wraps under the tree. The recently released Rails 5.0.1 is required for ruby 2.4.0.

The Solidus core team would like to publicly thank and acknowledge Jordan Brough for his contributions to both the Solidus community and the codebase over the past few years. Jordan has been dedicated to working with Solidus since its inception back in 2013 when Jordan helped migrate a large fashion-based company from Spree to Solidus.  Motivated by the benefits and potential of open source, Jordan began contributing to what now amounts to an impressive [331 commits](https://github.com/solidusio/solidus/commits?author=jordan-brough) in the [Solidus Github repository](https://github.com/solidusio/solidus). However, before his work with the Spree and Solidus open source platforms, 99% of Jordan’s code was written for closed source platforms. The switch from closed to open source software has allowed him to experience firsthand the value of open source platforms for companies needing a custom store and the ability to grow without the limits of a packaged product. Jordan found his next career move when his current employer, [Lost My Name](https://www.lostmy.name/), advertised for an open source ecommerce champion. Jordan’s current role as tech lead finds him guiding his team in best practices and encouraging them to contribute back to the Solidus platform. Within the Solidus community, Jordan enjoys the teamwork and the feedback he receives. “You see all these pull requests and bug reports coming in from all over the world, from different types of companies. It helps me understand other’s perspectives and make better software.” Jordan is primarily focussed on the Solidus backend, improving tax integration, US taxes, and payment methods. When he’s not on his computer, Jordan practices his unicycling and inspires his five children to be active and enjoy the outdoors in their beautiful home state of Utah. Jordan has worked remotely for most of his career and finds that lunches with his family help to balance his focussed work ethic. You can find Jordan on Slack as jordan and Github as [jordan-brough](https://github.com/jordan-brough). Thank you Jordan for your involvement in the Solidus community!

We're proud to announce that SolidusConf 2017 will take place on the 24th and 25th of May. It is presented by Lost My Name and will be hosted at The Rainmaking Loft in London next to the iconic Tower Bridge.

Solidus versions 2.0.0 and 1.4.0 are out! Solidus 2.0.0 is our first release supporting Rails 5. See the Rails documentation on how to upgrade to Rails 5.

We've released Solidus 2.0.0.beta1 and 1.4.0.beta1! One of our primary concerns when developing Solidus is allowing easy upgrades.

In this blog post, I want to talk about three areas that we have improved massively in Solidus 1.3: Internationalization, Support for Value Added Tax, More flexible Pricing

Introducing Solidus 1.3.0, the "international" release. This release introduces major changes intended to support VAT taxation and per-country pricing better. Martin's SolidusConf 2016 talk gives an introduction to these changes and their motivation. A blog post focusing on upgrading is to come.

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.