This Month in Solidus: Holidays 2020 Edition

Hey there, and welcome to This Month in Solidus: 2020 EOY Edition! This update covers everything that happened in the Solidus world in December 2020 and January 2021.

Solidus 2.11.4 Is Out, with Rails 6.1 Support

Solidus 2.11.4 was released on January 19, and includes full support for Rails 6.1 as well as a few other minor improvements and bugfixes.

If you are were planning to upgrade to Rails 6.1, now is a good time to do it!

Thanks to Filippo Liverani from Nebulab for taking the lead on this!

Solidus 3.0: A Clean Start, Coming Soon!

In the past few months, most of the work has gone towards removing all the code that was deprecated in Solidus 2.x, in preparation for Solidus 3.

This was a huge lift that required the effort of many contributors across several months, and the end result is pretty amazing: we have removed almost 6,000 lines of legacy code, which included deprecated classes, methods, preferences and supporting utilities.

Solidus 3 represents a clean start for the framework and allows us to continue iterating and stay on top of industry trends, while also providing the same stability and the same guarantees as its predecessors.

A huge thanks to everyone that was involved in this, and especially to Filippo Liverani, Dumitru Ceban, Daniele Palombo and Alberto Vena from Nebulab!

Extensions Updates: solidus_feeds and solidus_subscriptions

In the extensions ecosystem, most of the effort has went into two major initiatives that should make it even easier to jumpstart a modern Solidus store.

solidus_feeds was just released, with built-in support for the Google Merchant XML format and full decoupling of feed generation and publishing. In other words, you can easily implement your custom feed formats and take advantage of one of the existing publishers, or publish one of the existing feed formats to some custom location, all through a fully configurable API. Thanks to Elia Schito, Nicolò Rebughini and Flavio Auciello from Nebulab for their hard work on this.

solidus_subscriptions, an old and beloved extension, has also seen a lot of improvements recently. Most of the work has gone towards improving the admin UI around subscriptions and streamlining the processing logic to make it more flexible and resilient than ever. Some goodies were also thrown in for good measure, such as built-in ChurnBuster support and more choices around failed payment processing. Thanks to Igor Barbosa, Nicolò Rebughini and Alessandro Desantis from Nebulab!

GitHub Discussions Is the Place to Be

Up until now, all of the community interactions have happened mostly in our Slack workspace (which, by the way, is still worth joining if you're not there yet!). While Slack is great for quick chit-chat and casual interactions, it's less than ideal for support requests: it's not indexed and hard to search. As a result, great answers were getting lost, and great questions were being asked over and over again.

When GitHub Discussions became available, it just felt like the perfect solution to our problems, and we decided to give it a try. You can access our discussions board by clicking the "Discussions" tab in the main Solidus repository. Some quality conversation is already happening there, so make sure to swing by and say hello!

New Roadmap in The Works

With the new year, we immediately started to work on a new roadmap for Solidus! The new roadmap will include a mix of initiatives that we still believe in and didn't get to just yet, and new projects that we believe will set Solidus on the path for success.

If you have any feedback for us, don't be a stranger to jump on Slack or GitHub Discussions!

Until next time! 👋