Vue Storefront 1.11 and The Roadmap update

We’ve just released the Vue Storefront 1.11rc-1. It has introduced quite a lot of refactoring and upgrades. This is going to be the best and most stable Vue Storefront release so far. We’re really proud of it and now we’re finally ready to streamline and stabilize upgrades/release cycle.

The Best Release so far

We’re really proud of Vue Storefront 1.11 Release Candidate. We refactored the Category and Product pages. Now, we feel they’re much easier to extend and customize. Category page supports multi-filters that can be passed via URL parameters.

We’ve also spent a significant amount of time refactoring all the other vuex modules — adding unit tests and splitting the actions into much simpler and re-usable helpers. Another thing that improved was the Multistore. Now it lets users to run multi-store installations on multiple domains. The last part was URL Dispatcher that got optimized and the business logic streamlined.

More than that, we’ve added the Output Cache support in the Vue Storefront API which improves the response rates significantly, especially on heavy traffic sites.

This version is covering 214 issues (features and bug fixes) and it’s the biggest release so far. We’d like to Thank You our community and all the contributors.

Note: Today’s release is not yet labeled as stable. Please wait with the updates till 1.11 stable; we’d like to spend the upcoming 4–6 weeks for the stabilization phase.

Check the full Changelog and Release notes

The Roadmap

We’re constantly checking up with our users — developers building shops on Vue Storefront and partner agencies developing modules and themes. What can I say is we heard you and we decided to stabilize the upcoming release cycle and to not introduce breaking changes in the upcoming releases (1.12, 1.13…).

After two years of intensive development and the growing number of live projects, we feel that Vue Storefront 1.11 is stable, and it’s here to stay. We’d like to show our commitment to agencies, merchants and individual developers supporting their daily efforts.

What does it mean? This release was planned to stay with us for longer (even 6–8 months to the next major release). The next updates will introduce no breaking changes — meaning it should be in general just: git pull and no additional effort required to upgrade. The release cycle will intentionally slow down.

In the upcoming months we’ll be focused on delivering more stability, bug and security fixes along with continuously upgrading our documentation and video tutorials. Oh! and the unit test base. More than that we will keep all the dependencies up to date — including upcoming VSF stack upgrade to Elastic 7 (you might want to check the experimental ES7 support. This feature should be deployed before 1.11 stable release and it’s 100% transparent for the frontend application).

Of course, we’d like to develop some additional cool business features — like new StorefrontUI based theme. This new theme will be compatible with VS 1.11 and it will be an alternative to current default. It won’t replace it. Most of the features will be released as far as possible as the external/optional modules.

Note: Because of all the efforts we invested in 1.11 the upgrade process from 1.10 to 1.11 can be a bit complex.

We don’t want anyone to feel forced to spend a significant amount of time on updating to latest version just to receive stability fixes. If you are interested in Long Term Support for version 1.10, or backporting certain elements from 1.11 to 1.10 do contact us and we’re happy to discuss so.

Of course all community contributions to 1.10 branch will also be merged and available to everyone. The paid version will let you hire core team to backport certain fixes/improvements from 1.11 or create dedicated ones. This way we can still focus on product development while being able to help those on version 1.10 when they need it. All the fixes — even made under Production Package Support packages will be open-sourced ang generally available. By buying this package — your company becomes viable contributor to the whole ecosystem.

Please expect a steady stream of minor bug fixing releases in the 1.11.x and 1.10.x lines. Some minor features could be included. No breaking changes guaranteed.

R&D

There is always plenty of ideas what can we do better and improve. We’ve got a lot of thoughts on how to speed-up and streamline the Vue Storefront Architecture.

We’ve initially planned to introduce some of these architectural changes into Vue Storefront 2.0 but seemingly it’s not a good idea. We introduced too many breaking changes in the past and it always was like: we were doing some compromises — therefore the results could have always been better.

Regarding the number of production sites up and running and the expectations of our developers we decided that there won’t be 2.0 release anytime soon.

We’ve moved all R&D works into separate stream that will result probably in the new Vue Storefront product line or just prototypes. We’re not sure when we’ll be ready to show you any results. Bear with us :)

Upcoming events

Check our Events page and feel warmly welcomed to our upcoming events:

• 10th of October — Hamburg by Tom Tailor,
• 18th of October — Amsterdam by Get.Noticed

Big thanks to Agence Dn’D and Artifakt for having us in Paris!

You could have met us on DMEXCO …

…. and another Hacakthon made by Borek.Digital in Brunswick/Germany and one more in Stockholm made by KodBruket.

Oh wait! And our very own hackathon in New York City connected with PWA Meetup.

Check out our Events page for all upcoming activities.