The Vue Storefront Roadmap
Vue Storefront has been on the market for more than 1.5 years. It’s the 6th most popular eCommerce project on Github. We have never been so committed to making this product better and better. Our goal is ambitious: To become the industry standard for eCommerce PWAs (long term goal).
This is the commitment to people who choose Vue Storefront for their commercial projects and for our partners and developers who work on the core.
Developers and merchants choose Vue Storefront for many different reasons: the technology we used (Vue.js), platform agnosticism (using it as a framework), the number of ready to use features (using it to shorten the time to market), or because they’re using Magento (which is our default integration at the moment).
The Vue Storefront goals
We’ve just finished the Roadmap update for the upcoming year. We categorized our mid-term goals and the workstreams into four categories — to properly address the needs of our users:
- Goal #1: to keep the Magento PWA leader status, support all ongoing and future implementations, maintain stability and backward compatibility at the highest level. We set the “implementations” work stream for that.
- Goal #2: to improve our developer’s framework, improve the test coverage and code quality. We set the “improvements” work stream for this purpose.
- Goal #3: to extend the number of supported backends in the ”integrations” workstream
- Goal #4: to add new business features — in the “features” workstream.
What to expect in the next year?
The Vue Storefront project is developed not by a single company but rather by the whole community — about 120 contributors and around 1200 developers involved in the community (full list). However, we’re trying to put an accent on the most important and most requested features. This is how the Vue Storefront Roadmap was created.
Implementations workstream
To support the current and future commercial implementations, we’ll be working on the following features:
- Data indexer improvements for both Magento1 and Magento2 — replacing the mage2vuestorefront at some point with solely native indexers (already available for tests on Github). New indexers work in real time with support for high-performance indexing leveraging the native Magento indexer architecture,
- Magento1 connector will be published under the MIT license (previously only partially open sourced) with better docs,
- Magento 2.3, MSI support — Alessandro Ronchi + the Bitbull team is working on this,
- Full support for custom URL structure
- Payment Request API support
- Multi-filters support,
- ElasticSearch 6.x upgrade,
- External Checkout improvements (by our partner Vendic),
- Prismic, Nosto, Klevu, Klarna (Kodbruket.se is working on this one) integrations,
- Stabilization + fixes,
- Unit/Integration test coverage improvements — our goal is to 100% coverage for business logic.
Improvements workstream
We were first to the market and that allowed us to become the leader. Now we’re extremely focused on improving all the things that we could have done better, while maintaining backwards compatibility.
- With the new release, we’re changing the release mode to Stable / Un-Stable (RC) phases to improve the stability without decreasing the pace. Read more on this.
- We’re hiring an official Tech Writer and we’re committed to improving our Docs,
- Theme 2.0 —based on the Design System, lean UI components with optimized performance (we plan to start with a 100% Lighthouse score and not let it go down! :))
- CLI tool + project boilerplate — a kind of “create-react-app” or “vue-cli” — CLI + Theme 2.0 are the key building blocks of Vue Storefront 2.0 — the date is not set yet, we’ll release it when is it ready :)
- Vuex data layer refactoring — to make it cleaner, easier to understand for newcomers — we’ll propose RFC for that short and it will be backward compatible (no data format changes, no public actions changed),
- With the Vuex refactoring, we’re going to separate the backend API calls from Vuex actions to make third-party integrations way easier (and to support Magento 2.3 graphQL mutations as they’ll be finally published)
- Payment methods refactoring,
- Checkout module refactoring,
- Shortening the build time by replacing TS compiler with Babel 7,
- Refactoring Service Workers to use WorkBox,
Integrations workstream
We’re currently having quite a lot of integration efforts executed by our partners. We’d love to support them:
- EpiServer integration is on its way (by Making Waves)
- Spree Commerce integration is on its way (by Spark Solutions)
- WooCommerce, BigCommerce — there are PoC’s we’d be happy to invest more into it,
- We’re working on vue-storefront-simple-api module for making 3rd party integrations way easier in general.
Features workstream
We’re trying to make VS Core the best possible solution for PWA apps. Our feature base is pretty high — covering most of the B2C features + superior extendibility based on modules + themes. Our partners are adding a lot of new features and we’re launching the Marketplace in Q2.
You can expect a lot of new business features, however — we’d like to keep this workstream pretty open. Bear with us!
Your feedback
We’re curious about Your feedback. Contact us at contributors@vuestorefront.io. This Roadmap isn’t set in stone and we’re happy to modify it regarding our users’ needs.
More about Vue Storefront and its community at www.vuestorefront.io.
