Solidus Community Roadmap - 2017/2018

Since we forked Spree three years ago, we’ve been heads down, working through the technical direction of the project. We’re very proud of the technical progress we’ve made over the last three years, and have a concrete plan for continued success. With our focus on the codebase as a hopefully-valid-excuse for being poor communicators, we realize we’re long overdue to discuss the community and collaborative roadmap for Solidus.

We’re very happy to share with you the progress made toward our 2017 goals, as well as what we can expect heading into 2018.

Documentation and User Onboarding

One of the biggest (and most valid) complaints against Solidus is the lack of user, code, and developer documentation. Early in the fork, we survived leveraging the Spree documentation. But, as our projects diverged, the adoption of Solidus increased, and our development practices improved, what little documentation we had became less valuable to an ever-growing number of people.

To fix that deficiency, Stembolt has hired a full-time technical writer to improve the documentation of the Solidus platform and its ecosystem of projects. Benjamin comes with experience in writing for ecommerce platforms, and is currently building up his Solidus knowledge and end-to-end plan for documentation before he starts sharing his plans and writing on our GitHub repo.

Solidus Rebranding

Traditionally Solidus had a technical focus, speaking developer to developer. The original site gave us a bare bones web presence to share our goals and link to GitHub. Today, we need to speak to a broader audience that includes the decision makers in the companies that use Solidus to power their storefront.

In June of this year, we polled the community for their thoughts on the current site and what they need to help sell Solidus to their clients. Stembolt took that data and hired a digital marketing agency to refresh the Solidus brand and build a new marketing website. When they’re done we’ll have a new logo, visual look and feel as well as content that will better align with our vision to position Solidus as a mainstream ecommerce solution.

We’ve made a commitment to get this new site and experience up for Q4 of 2017 and are incredibly excited to share it with the community.

Community Content

Open source is the best way to do software. Those who work on improving the platform do so because they share your core belief. Just as we have multiple developers contributing to the codebase, we’d also like to invite our community to contribute to the content on the website.

We’re looking for developers, stores, or agencies to share their experiences and learnings in case studies and whitepapers. We’re happy to work with anyone interested on the copy and execution, if you don’t have the time or resources to construct it independently. Can’t spare the time to put up a case study? We’re also looking for logos and testimonials from bigger brands to help build social proof. Contact us for more information.

Extension Support

Our integration map was developed to ensure all the extensions we ported from Spree or built from scratch are supported against all the published versions of Solidus. The list quickly grew to include community-contributed extensions.

We want to ensure that anyone interested in having their extension listed (and continually tested) is welcome to email us. Incredible value is provided to the project by these community extensions and one of our highest priorities is to support maintainers.

Partnership Mailing List

We’re in the early phase of planning a partnership program for agencies and developers with expertise and experience with the Solidus platform. We invite anyone interested in joining the partnership program to sign up to the mailing list to be a part of the early conversation and get updates when the program rolls out.

Continuing the Conversation

Anyone looking for more information about any of the topics mentioned above is welcome to shoot us an email or start a conversation in the Slack #solidus channel. As a project, we value and heavily weigh the feedback we get from stores, developers, and agencies that reach out.