This Month in Solidus: April 2020

Hello folks, and welcome to our first edition of This Month in Solidus!

As you may guess from the name, this is a monthly blog post we'll be publishing with news from the entire Solidus ecosystem. The goal is to keep you in the loop about what's happening and make sure you take advantage of all the latest opportunities Solidus and its community provide you.

Without further ado, here's what happened in the Solidus world in April 2020!

Community

You have probably noticed we have started rolling out a complete revamp of our website. It's important to note this isn't just a cosmetic change: we are completely restructuring our communication and tone of voice to highlight Solidus' benefits and make the framework more accessible to non-technical audiences:

• We started with our home page, which was rebuilt from scratch in order to clearly communicate the advantages of Solidus for both developers and business stakeholders.
• We then created an Integrations page, where you can clearly see which services Solidus integrates with, and how you can use such integrations to create value for your business.
• The real star, however, has been our Roadmap page. We have always been big on transparency in this community, so it just seemed right to publicly advertise our technical roadmap for 2020 — now, the entire community can see what we're up to and what our plans are for the rest of the year.

The new website is seeing a tremendous response among the community, and we're really thankful for all the feedback and enthusiasm that you have shown so far! We still have much more to show you, so be on the lookup for new pages! 👀

A big thank you to Davide Di Stefano, Michela Frecchiami and everyone else at Nebulab who's helped with the new design and copy, and to everyone in the Solidus community who's helped us with reviews and adjustments.

Finally, we've been working on a demo site, where you can preview the admin side of Solidus without having to spin up your own server. You're also able to take a guided tour of some of our favorite features of the platform. It's still very much a work in progress, but we invite you to take a look and let us know what you think. Shoutout to Sean Denny from Nebulab for leading this!

Core

We shipped some exciting improvements that had been anticipated in the Q1 roadmap update:

• ActiveStorage support was merged. Support for ActiveStorage was finalized and merged into the core. ActiveStorage will be the official default starting from Rails 6.1, which will introduce the ability to generate public URLs for attachments. Thanks to Elia Schito and Filippo Liverani from Nebulab for their work on this!
• Paranoia will be removed in Solidus 3. Paranoia-style soft-deletion, where deleted records are completely removed from the default scope, is now considered a bad practice. We prepared a PR for Solidus 3 that will completely remove Paranoia from the core in favor of the more explicit and intentional Discard gem. Thanks to Dumitru Ceban from Nebulab!
• We added support for international names. Not all names are made by two words, and we want Solidus to be respectful and inclusive of these differences. With these three PRs, we added support for more complex names — all while maintaining full backwards compatibility. Thanks to Filippo Liverani from Nebulab for his dedication to this matter!

This month, core also saw a huge amount of issue/PR triaging and finalization work. We resumed work on some old issues and PRs that had been forgotten, and made sure that those that are open are still relevant. Thanks a lot to Jared Norman from Super Good Software, Edwin Cruz from MagmaLabs and all the other contributors who helped us with the spring cleaning!

Extensions

It's been an exciting month in the world of Solidus extensions, with a ton of progress done on our roadmap goals:

• Data importer: our first stable release of solidus_importer is expected this week! You will be able to import users, products and orders, along with all related data such as taxons, variants, images, option types and so on. Our next focus will be the ability to export data as well. Thanks to Mattia Roccoberton and Flavio Auciello from Nebulab!
• Content management: solidus_content now integrates with Contentful, Prismic, static sources such as YAML and JSON and, of course, the old and beloved solidus_static_content extension. We are now working on the admin UI to make it easier to create content types and entries without any development work. Thanks to Elia Schito and Andrea Vassallo from Nebulab!
• Segment integration: we have started work on our new solidus_segment extension, which uses Solidus' brand new event bus to send order events and other analytics information to Segment. From Segment, it's easy to forward the data to your tools of choice — no development work required. Thanks to Alessio Rocco from Nebulab!
• New storefront: our new solidus_starter_frontend is almost ready for some action! With semantic structure, a fresh design and more sensible defaults, the new storefront sets the foundation for modern frontend support in Solidus. We are finalizing the checkout flow and still need to polish some rough edges, but we expect to have exciting news soon! Thanks to Dino Hamzić and Paolo Tatone from Nebulab for leading this initiative!
• GraphQL API: the solidus_graphql_api team is also working on finalizing the checkout flow. Once that's out of the way, we'll focus our efforts on documenting all types and mutations properly, and making sure that hte documentation is easily accessible, just like for the REST API. Thanks to Christian Rimondi, Rainer Dema, Alessio Rocco and Samuel Martini from Nebulab for the hard work!
• Affirm: the new solidus_affirm_v2 has been refactored and upgraded to use the new Transaction API from Affirm to be able to use lease-to-own (LTO) providers partnered with Affirm. This partnership is in selective beta at Affirm right now, when publicly available this extension will be able to connect with those partners out-of-the-box. Thanks to Peter Berkenbosch, whose work is sponsored by our Open Collective fund!
• Product kits: the new solidus_kits is a complete rewrite of the beloved solidus_product_assembly and allows you to create product bundles/kits to simplify the shopping experience and increase AOV. We have completed the admin UI and are now in the final stages of testing. Thanks to the team at Deseret Book for open-sourcing this work!

Be on the lookout for initial releases of some of these extensions in May!

🎉 SolidusConf 2020 🎉

This year, we're proud to announce that SolidusConf 2020 will be a completely digital experience. In fact, we're focusing on making this year's conference the most interactive and engaging SolidusConf yet!

Dates and details are coming soon - stay tuned on the Solidus Slack, this blog and our mailing list (in the footer) for more information!