This Month in Solidus: May 2020

Hello everyone, and welcome to the second edition of This Month in Solidus, May 2020 edition!

Tons of exciting news this month: we have a new member in the core team, 2.11 is on its way with tons of improvements, and we're hosting our very first Community Day.

Jared Norman joins the core team

Jared is the owner of Super Good Software, long-time friends of the Solidus community and among the largest technical and financial contributors to the platform. Jared has been doing an amazing work in the last few weeks by helping us triage issues and PRs.

It only seemed natural to make things official by inviting him to join the core team, where he'll be able to continue supporting the Solidus core and extensions ecosystem.

Welcome, Jared! 👋

Solidus 2.11 is on its way!

You may have noticed the core team is busy working on the 2.11 release. This is a special release for a couple of reasons: first of all, it comes with tons of performance enhancements, feature improvements and bug fixes across the board.

Bust most importantly, this is the last release in the 2.x branch! 🎊 Yep, you read that right! 2.11 paves the way for the much anticipated 3.0 release.

Now, if you know anything about Solidus, you know how much we care about backwards compatibility and not breaking your apps. This is why we plan to introduce any new features and enhancements in 2.11, whereas 3.0 will simply remove all deprecated APIs from the code.

The idea is that, if you're on 2.11 and not seeing any deprecation warnings, you can safely update to Solidus 3.0 and everything will keep working!

Core updates in May

Here are some of the new features and enhancements introduced in May:

• Restrict shipping methods to stock locations. It is now possible to restrict shipping methods to select stock locations rather than displaying them for all stock locations. Thanks to Dumitru Ceban from Nebulab for uncovering this hidden gem in the code and creating a UI to allow anyone to use it!
• Pagination in the stock locations UI. The Stock Locations page in the backend was missing a pagination UI, which was causing issues for stores with a high number of stock locations. Thanks to Edwin Cruz from MagmaLabs for taking care of the problem!
• Configurable guest token cookie options. If you need to configure the parameters of the guest token cookie, you can now do it via a handy Solidus preference. This is very useful if you need to change the domain of the cookie, for example. Thanks to Thomas von Deyen for the new feature!
• Order validation during updates. We know how important data integrity is to you. With this change, the order is re-validated every time the order updater is run, to make sure you're not inadvertently saving bad data. Thanks to Alberto Vena from Nebulab for restoring and finalizing this PR!
• "Only Active" filter in promotions UI. You can now filter promotions by their state, and only get the ones that are currently active. This is extremely useful for stores that use promotions heavily — sorting through the list should be much easier now. Thanks to @wildbillcat for the feature!

You can expect to see these and many more in 2.11!

Introducing Solidus Community Day!

In order to bring the amazing Solidus community together more often, we're setting up a Solidus Community Day on June 12th, where you'll be able to talk about the current state of Solidus, the future of the platform, as well as meet and network with eCommerce industry experts. We'll also have speaker sessions where you'll be able to hear from Solidus experts about any number of topics.

This month, we've got Solidus expert Peter Berkenbosch. Peter is an open-source and eCommerce veteran who's been working with Spree and Solidus for over a decade. He's specialized in bridging product, leadership and development to create high-quality eCommerce stacks. He's a CXOps enthusiast and is passionate about building technology teams and empower them to be their best.

Peter is going to talk about solidus_dev_support and how it supports developers in creating Solidus extensions. He'll be generating an extension from scratch and highlighting the features that come out of the box with solidus_dev_support.

We want to make this a monthly event, so we hope you'll join us in making this Solidus Community Day a success. You can sign up here. See you there!