Solidus Admin v0.5.0

With the release of Solidus v4.8 last week, it was past time we dropped a new release of Solidus Admin. If you're not familiar, Admin is the replacement for Solidus Backend. It brings UX improvements, better extensibility, and a fresh look for Solidus's management interface.

Today we cut version 0.5.0, the first feature release since February of last year. This new version brings faster load times, a toolkit for building form interfaces, support for all three currently supported versions of Solidus, and a full pass on Solidus's settings interfaces.

Keep in mind that Solidus Admin is pre-1.0. This and every minor release contains breaking changes. You'll find some more information on these below.

Faster where it counts

Software performance work is often driven by necessity. Every solution is fast enough until it isn't. We're fortunate that since our last release, large Solidus stores have tried out Solidus Admin, found the bottlenecks, and contributed back fixes. Special thanks to FCP Euro in particular!

This release includes huge improvements to the performance of order pages, product pages, and various collection pages, as well as pagination improvements. For admins who view these pages frequently, you'll immediately notice the difference.

Now it's yours to build on

Solidus Admin aims to bring a new level of extensibility to Solidus. We want developers to be able to add elaborate new interfaces without having to code every last form element themselves.

This new release includes a new solidus_form_for form builder which plugs into a whole host of components. You can build your own admin interfaces quickly and easily. We're excited for extensions to take advantage of this new tooling to both offer native-looking functionality and allow existing interfaces to stay up to date without any extra effort.

Meet stores where they are

Given we'd not seen a release in over a year and a half, it was time to evaluate the compatibility story. Once Solidus Admin hits v1, it'll be released in lockstep with the rest of Solidus's components. For now, we want as many people as possible to try it and provide feedback.

As such, this release supports all three currently supported versions of Solidus: v4.6, v4.7, and the newly released v4.8. If you're on a supported release, you don't have to upgrade to get the new admin changes.

That said, some features are only available on the new release. You'll want to upgrade to v4.8 if you want to take advantage of the time zone selector and the ability to manage your store's physical address.

Notably, this version doesn't include an upgrade to ViewComponent 4. This will be coming in another release shortly. We didn't want to create too much of a barrier to upgrade. We take the upgrade path seriously, even for this pre-1.0 component.

Settings without the trapdoor

One of the best features of Solidus Admin is that it falls back to the old backend interface when a page is missing. This allows you to install Admin today, use the pages that are there, and when you click on a link to a page that's not built yet, you get the old admin. Besides the design/interface changes, it's basically seamless.

Before this release, very few of the settings pages were complete. With v0.5, you can now manage tax rates, payment methods (partial), stores, zones, stock locations, and option types/values. Editing your store's settings never looked so good.

What's next

Solidus Admin is under active development and we weren't able to fit everything in this release into the blog post. Check out the full release notes for the complete picture. Besides ViewComponent 4 support, there's a lot in the works too: product creation, improved taxon selection, as well as brand new features like store logo and favicon editing. We're working hard to make Solidus Admin a complete replacement for Solidus Backend, so we can put Backbone.js to bed once and for all.

Thanks

Big thanks to Benjamin Wil, Eugene Chaikin, and everyone else who contributed to this release. We've merged 80 PRs since our last release!

If you have any feedback about Solidus Admin or any of our other new releases, hit up GitHub Discussions or join our Community Slack!