How to Get Developer Updates from BigCommerce
BigCommerce is growing and changing every day. As a team, we are increasingly dedicated to delivering new features and providing updates for you — the developers building on BigCommerce. Our focus is on building an open platform where developers have the freedom to customize and build what’s relevant to your business and your clients.
As you know, change is constant — and can happen fast. As our platform is constantly evolving, staying informed and in the loop on key updates is more important than ever. We want you to know what happens as it happens (or before!), especially when there is the possibility for disruption or breaking changes. Our goal is to give you the information you need when you need it. In this post, we’ll explore your options for getting information on important changes to the BigCommerce platform.
Review our Changelog
Our Changelog is a record of notable updates to our platform. The Changelog includes feature releases, updates or enhancements made to existing features and bug fixes. The purpose is to give you a real-time look what’s changing and when on the platform.
The BigCommerce Developer Changelog should be your first stop and source of truth for what’s changing on BigCommerce. The changelog is located in our Dev Center which is our home for documentation, resources, and tools for both API and Theme developers.
You’ll notice that Changelog updates are listed chronologically with the newest appearing first. To help make it easier to navigate at a glance, we’ve also added category tags in a side navigation menu. You can quickly sort and see updates related to topics like APIs, Stencil, WordPress, and more. You’ll also find tags for updates related to warnings, announcements, and maintenance issues that you’ll want to keep an extra close eye on.
Currently, you’ll see a notification within the Dev Center when a new changelog update is available. Our team also shares updates as they happen on Twitter at @BigCommerceDevs. In the future, we’ll be implementing an email notification system, allowing you to easily subscribe to the latest changes.
Follow @BigCommerceDevs on Twitter
The BigCommerce Developer Advocacy team is on Twitter and ready for you to join the conversation. Follow @BigCommerceDevs and get updates on the latest changelog updates, Developer Blog posts, industry news, and community conversations. We can’t wait to hear from you, see what you’re working on, and answer your questions.
Don’t want to miss a single tweet? On our profile page, expand the three-dot menu, and select to “Turn on mobile notifications.” This will send BigCommerce developer updates to the palm of your hand.
Get Support & Contribute in our Dev Community
Sometimes staying informed means getting answers to your questions when you need them. Our Developer Community is here to help. We have active and engaged peer-to-peer support conversations taking place in spaces like StackOverflow, Github, WordPress forum, and the BigCommerce Community.
Here’s where to join the conversation:
1. BigCommerce Developers Community Group.
This is a great spot to learn about developing on BigCommerce. Here, developers often ask open-ended, advice-based questions and together push the boundaries of what can be built and achieved. Have an idea of something you’d like to build, but don’t know how — ask it here.
Remember when asking questions in the Community to share your code, store URL, and as many relevant details and examples of what you’ve tried and what you’re hoping to build.
2. Stack Overflow.
Need help specifically with your code? Share your work and problem solve with other developers on StackOverflow.
When posting, keep in mind that Stack Overflow prefers questions that are well searched, researched, and provide a detailed summary of the problem and steps to reproduce. Well-formed, thoughtfully asked questions tend to lead to more comments and answers from the community.
And finally, don’t forget to tag your post with BigCommerce (along with the related languages, libraries, and frameworks) when submitting your question.
3. GitHub.
Want to contribute directly to our open source projects? Find us on GitHub, where you can view the source code and commit history for projects like Cornerstone, Stencil CLI, and our API clients.
We welcome pull requests from the community, so be sure to check out each repository’s CONTRIBUTING.md file for details on submitting changes. Not sure where to start? Open issues are a great place to find feature requests and bug fixes that have been requested by the community.
4. WordPress.Org Support Forum.
Developing ecommerce sites using the BigCommerce for WordPress plugin? This is the community space for you. On WordPress.org, you can engage with our plugin support staff along with other WordPress developers to troubleshoot and ask questions. We’d love to hear what you’re working on along with your feature requests for improving and extending the plugin.
And finally, if you need one-on-one help outside of online community spaces, you can always contact our team directly. BigCommerce offers 24-hour assisted tech support to all users of the platform, whether you’re on a trial or a paid plan. Contact our support team by phone, chat, or create a case in our Help Center. If you are a partner, please submit your cases through the Partner Portal.
Subscribe to the BigCommerce Dev Blog
In January 2019, we launched the BigCommerce Developers Blog on Medium to showcase content that matters to developers building apps, custom ecommerce sites, and other solutions for BigCommerce stores. It’s geared toward a technical audience and is meant to serve as a compliment to our existing technical documentation, offering additional information and tutorials to help you better extend our platform.
In the blog, our team is sharing how-to tutorials, developer stories, product announcements, and community highlights. To learn more about our content and what to expect, check out our Welcome post.
Want to contribute to the dev blog or have an idea for a tutorial you’d like to see? We’d love to talk! Email community@bigcommerce.com or tweet us @BigCommerceDevs.
Get Notified in the Partner Portal
Log in to your Partner Portal at partners.bigcommerce.com for product updates, new feature releases and beta releases, upcoming events, program updates and more.
If you are not currently a partner, or you are not sure whether your company is a part of the agency or tech partner program, apply to the program at www.bigcommerce.com/partners. Use your business email address, and if your company has an existing account, you’ll be prompted with an option to connect your account to the company profile.
Keep in Touch
Connecting with our team, the Dev Community, and staying on top of relevant updates is critical to successfully developing on our platform. We hope to see you on these channels and interacting with us soon!
Want to start a conversation with our team now? Reply in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you.
