Vue Storefront current status and roadmap

We are constantly improving and working on Vue Storefront. The community is growing rapidly and the product is becoming more and more popular among businesses. We would like to show you a roadmap and what is going on behind the scenes.

We recently had a really cool hangout with our community, during which we showed what we are working on right now and revealed some of our plans for the future. Don’t worry if you missed it, there is a link to the recording below and this article will also summarize some of the topics from the hangout and shares our plans for the entire Vue Storefront ecosystem.

Two parallel pipelines

Vue Storefront 1.x takes most of our time and focus, but we are still thinking about improving our product for the future. That’s the general reason why we came up with the idea of Vue Storefront Next.

It’s our internal R&D side-project that introduces the new architecture and design, and actually changes the way we think about eCommerce software. As we already have integration with the Magento (Vue Storefront 1.x) and we are building this from scratch, in this project we’d like to connect with commercetools instead. It’s a nice opportunity to do this and expand to more platforms.

We are still discussing it and testing numerous solutions in order to cover the majority of the design-related problems that we came across while using the current Vue Storefront.

Nowadays, we have to work simultaneously on both projects but, of course, our main focus is still on the core VSF 1.x platform.

The relation between VSF 1.x and Vue Storefront Next

Basically, these two projects are totally independent of each other. Any decision, any changes or anything introduced in one project will not impact the other one.

However, we’d like to follow the new design and practices developed on Vue Storefront Next and that’s our future goal for VSF 1.x — to adjust the structure, files, and entire project to the new Vue Storefront Next architecture as much as possible. Of course, it will take lots of time (definitely not just one release), but we’d like to gradually follow that idea.

Roadmap for Vue Storefront 1.x

The recent release of version 1.11 introduced many improvements, but it’s just the beginning. In the upcoming versions, we would like to do even more. First of all, we don’t want to introduce significant BC-breaks, as we know that the upgrade is not that easy in that case. Each big feature will be developed as an external module that could be easily switched off. Below is the plan that shows the major goals for each future release.

Vue Storefront 1.12 — (optimization focus)

• separate npm packages
• optimize bundle size
• solve the problems with memory leaks
• increase lighthouse score

Vue Storefront 1.13 — (new UI)

• new (optional) theme based on StorefrontUI
• use StorefrontAPI as the default backend
• Improve ES querying (multi keywords search etc.)

Others (included in both releases)

• unit tests — cover more code with the unit tests
• docs — sections of our docs are sometimes not really up to date. Now we can put more effort into providing you with a really good guide and documentation

Those topics are just general picture of what we want to introduce or improve. There will probably be much more, but these are the most important.

Community modules

As release 1.11 introduces several refactorings, we won’t be modifying the core anymore, unless the changes are bug fixes or improvements. Each feature will be a separated module as it’s easier to maintain and develop. It opens up the opportunity for the community and ourselves to develop new features — you don’t have to follow changes in the core to keep your new feature up to date.

There were so many feature requests. We haven’t been able to work on all of them, but we should note that we are aware of the calls for WYSWIG editor and b2b. They are certainly on our radar.

Storefront Cloud

Vue Storefront is not only the community, open-source, and side projects; there is also a service called Storefront Cloud. It’s a great cloud-based solution (SaaS) for your Vue Storefront if you don’t want to install it on your own.

As demanding for this service is growing, we are planning to improve it to provide something more than ordinary SaaS.

Long Term Support 1.10

The most popular version among the customers and community is 1.10.x. Since the 1.11 introduces BC-breaks, the 1.10.x becomes an LTS as we don’t want to force everyone else to upgrade the product. We will maintain that version to provide you a stable platform that you can still use in your projects.

Learn more about Vue Storefront.