This Month in Solidus: February 2021

Hey there, and welcome to your usual This Month in Solidus! Let's dive in and see everything that happened in the Solidus world this February.

New Full-Time Maintainer 👷‍♂️

Yes, you read that right! So far, Solidus has progressed thanks to the generous contributions of its community, but we felt it was time we gave it a proper full-time maintainer, and Nebulab stepped in to fill the gap.

Marc Busqué is a senior Ruby developer based in beautiful Cambrils, Spain. He has an impressive track record of contributing to OSS, having worked on the renowned dry-rb ecosystem.

Marc recently joined the Nebulab team, where he will work with the Core Team on the maintenance and evolution of Solidus, splitting his time between keeping the platform in good shape and pushing it forward with his technical expertise.

Welcome aboard Marc, and best of luck!

P.S. Pretty soon, Marc should be in good company... Stay tuned!

Solidus 3 is getting closer 🚀

We are working hard to cross the ts and dot the is for the release of Solidus 3.0.

Last month, we organized a Hackathon to get the extensions ready for the next major bump, and the results were amazing: we got 23 extensions ready in a single day. Thanks to everyone who participated: your dedication to the project is truly inspiring!

With that said, there are still some extensions that could use some love! If you want to help, just follow the instructions in this GitHub Discussion, and ping us on Slack if you have any questions!

Backend UX Audit 🎨

Last Thursday, the stakeholders have approved a vote to engage Baymard for a UX audit of the Solidus backend.

We are extremely excited about this: Baymard is a world-class UX institute that has worked with some of the best players in the industry, and we're looking forward to using their expertise to improve the Solidus backend experience.

Furthermore, this is a major initiative that is being entirely financed by our Open Collective funds — we couldn't be more grateful to our contributors for their generosity. If you're a brand or an agency benefiting from Solidus and want to show your appreciation, joining Open Collective ie an amazing way to do it!

Baymard can use all the help they can get, so if you have any feedback to share about the Solidus backend that you think would be beneficial for this audit, don't be shy about stepping forward! You can reach out to any Core Team member on Slack, who will direct you to the proper channels.

ShipStation API Integration 📦

solidus_shipstation was recently overhauled to allow users to benefit from the new ShipStation API, which will eventually supersede the legacy XML integration.

The new API integration provides several advantages over the previous one: it is much more flexible, providing you with greater granularity of how you import and handle your orders in ShipStation, and much more performant, allowing you to sync up to 4000 orders/minute from your Solidus store.

Most importantly, we built the new integration so that switching from the legacy XML format is completely painless, so go ahead and check it out right now!

In The Works: Certified TaxJar Integration 💸

SuperGood's TaxJar integration has always been amazing, but it's about to get so much better!

The SuperGood team is working towards getting the extension fully certified, which means they will add a ton of new features in the process.

They could definitely use some help, so if you have worked with TaxJar in the past and want to contribute, hop on GitHub!

Aaaand that's it for now. See you next month! ❤️