BigCommerceDevs Recap: H1 ‘23!
Howdy, developers, partners & merchants!
If you can believe it, we’re a little over halfway through 2023. Our DevRel team wanted to let our Developer Community know what we at BigCommerce have been up to thus far. We’ve been busy!
Developer-Facing Product Highlights: H1⭐️
This year, Developer Experience on the platform is, without a doubt, one of our biggest priorities as a company, and absolutely our biggest priority on DevRel. We’ve been hyper-focused on moving quickly, hearing feedback and pivoting when necessary, and working to innovate and build the best, most reliable ecommerce platform that developers truly love to build on.
The following are some of the major developer-facing product updates that were added during H1:
💥 App Extensions now available to all BigCommerce app developers — This is a really exciting feature for app developers! It allows you to add your app’s functionality into the merchant’s Control Panel so the app appears completely native.
💥 GraphQL Users and Cart & Checkout Storefront APIs — Our GraphQL offerings are steadily increasing! You asked & we heard you! These provide extended GraphQL Storefront API coverage, as well as for the Users API.
💥 V2 Integration to Google BigQuery — This is V2 of our native integration into Google’s BigQuery and allows for advanced analytics and custom reporting, where you can write custom SQL to analyze your data in BigQuery, create custom reports, and more!
💥Multi-Storefront (MSF) storefront limit increase from 5 to 8 — Another direct response to developer requests: increasing the limit of stores managed through multi-storefront has been upped from 5 to 8.
💥 Non-store Owner API key access — Another common request now fulfilled — this allows store owners to provide developers or agencies access to create their own API keys to do development work on the store.
💥B2B Enhancements — Three HUGE solutions for developers and merchants appear with these enhancements: multi-storefront compatibility, a Buyer Portal, and headless support for that Buyer Portal are now available.
💥Account-Level API tokens — For any large enterprise merchants who want to have an automated user onboarding & off-boarding flow, these Account-Level API tokens provide you just that!
💥Omnichannel update: BOPIS — Buy Online Pickup In-Store — This new feature of our multi-location inventory functionality allows developers to build custom storefronts and custom checkout experiences!
💥DevCenter overhaul | This has been a major undertaking and an effort to consolidate and make intuitive our developer resources, like our developer documentation and API references. Check out the new site and let us know what you think!
BigCommerceDevs Community Highlights: H1 ⭐️
💥 BigCommerce X Google BigAI Hackathon — 🚨Registration is still open!
We’ve announced our first-ever AI-centric hackathon! We’re co-hosting this event with Google, and can’t wait to see what our community builds for the ecosystem using VertexAI and the BigCommerce platform! We kick off on August 7th, and registration is still open! Sign up today!
💥 BigCommerce X Stripe Omnichannel Hackathon
This past spring, we hosted a hackathon together with Stripe which was all about omnichannel solutions! To read about what we were hacking on, check out Katie’s hackathon announcement blog.
💥 Developer Lounge at the BigCommerce Partner Summit
For the first time, we hosted a Developer Lounge at the BigCommerce Partner Summit in Austin! Though the Partner Summit is primarily targeted towards non-developers, we had a great number of devs come by the room, chat and collaborate with us and learn more about some exciting roadmap items BigCommerce has for the coming year. If you couldn’t make it, check out my Partner Summit recap blog!
💥 Beers & BigCommerceDevs in Austin
We hosted our first in-person BigCommerceDevs Happy Hour/Meetup the day after our Austin Partner Summit! It was so awesome to connect with developers in our community (in person!) and learn even more about our stellar Developer Community.
💥 BigComDevX
Space48 hosted their 2nd annual BigComDevX on June 16, inviting numerous BigCommerce developers to talk about all things BigCommerce! Heather, our Developer Community Programs Manager, and Katie, our Senior Developer Advocate, got to speak about DevRel at BigCommerce. Check out the sessions here!
💥 The ✨NEW✨ BigCommerce Developer Center Launch
This was a gigantic undertaking for our Developer Documentation team, and you’ll quickly see why! Our documentation writers, UX researchers and designers, DevEx engineers, and DevRel team rebuilt this resource with you, the developer, top of mind. Improving the UX of the DevCenter is a continued work in progress, and we’d love to hear your feedback! Check it out at https://developer.bigcommerce.com/ and let us know what you think via the feedback widget on the site!
💥 Solution Series Launch
This summer, we’ve kicked off a new, ongoing webinar series: BigCommerce Solution Series! This series will live on our YouTube channel and highlight cool and innovative solutions on the platform built by both internal BigCommerce engineers and developers from our Community! Got a cool app? An interesting headless build? A custom theme? Shoot us a message to be featured! Check out our first Solution Series webinar featuring BigCommerce Developer Advocate, Stephen, and Fueled.io’s Sean Larkin!
💥 BigCommerce Frontend Foundations by SwiftOtter Launch
BigCommerce partner SwiftOtter published their Frontend Foundations course to help developers working on BigCommerce build beautiful frontend solutions. Check it out!
Connect with the BigCommerceDevs Community!
If you’re a BigCommerce partner or developer who works on the BigCommerce platform, be sure to check out one of our many community spaces to connect with our team & fellow developers building on our platform.
👉 Join our Developer Slack space
This is the best place to connect with other developers and our Engineering & DevRel teams!
👉 Join our Discord Server
On Discord? Join our Discord community and become a part of the newest space exclusively designed for BigCommerceDevs
👉 Follow us on Twitter
Stay up-to-date on events, blog posts, video content, etc.
👉 Subscribe to our YouTube channel
We’ve got a lot planned, including our ongoing Solution Series webinar series and more enablement content to make building on BigCommerce even easier!
👉 Subscribe to the DevRel Newsletter
Subscribe to our newsletter, crafted with passion by our dedicated Developer Relations (DevRel) team. Here we share product updates, events and developments in the Community, updates from the DevRel team, and more! Currently, the newsletter is quarterly, but we are considering increasing it to monthly! Would love to hear what you think.
👉 Start your own community event!
If you’re interested in hosting your own community event or workspace, let us know! We love community-led initiatives and will find a way to support your efforts. A great example of this is BigComDevX, a virtual dev event for the Community. Our members are always thinking of ways to improve the ecosystem! Whether that’s via products they build or spaces they create for others to connect, ecosystem experience is top of mind. #CommunityLedIsTheFuture 🚀
BigComChat is a great example of this. BigComChat is a Slack workspace that was created and is led by the Community, and all are welcome. For non-devs that want to be part of a thriving BigCommerce Community, we invite you to join. Here partners, leaders, developers, merchants & the occasional BigCommerce employee gather to connect on the ecosystem.
Thanks for being with us. We’d be nothing without the developers this platform was built for. Cheers to a productive and exciting H1 and an even greater H2. #LFG 🚀
