A Return to the Release Cycle and a Glimpse into the Future

👋,

While Saleor has never been in a more exciting position, especially for those looking to push the envelope of modern e-commerce, I want to start this announcement in a different, but honest fashion: the ugly side.

The months that brought us to 2.10 were not exactly a blast. It was a heavy lifting process, pushing towards a more sustainable, flexible and better performing Saleor. The road to this release was paved with breaking changes and a lot of flux in the project; so first of all, a gigantic kudos to the whole team for their massive effort!

Secondly, thank you for your emails and feedback; honest user stories — your real-life e-commerce development struggles — are our best opportunity to move forward and improve on this challenging task. I would like to make it clear to you that we understand your concern towards some regression and a lengthy release cycle over the last months. We feel your pain having the majority of our own projects powered by Saleor.

Rapid development towards the next version resulted in some bugs and some of the new features caused instability in areas that had previously worked flawlessly. We originally built Saleor with bespoke solutions in mind, but since then many teams have wanted to use it for a much broader set of use cases. We’ve put in a lot of effort these last few months, planning and adding more baseline e-commerce features, to make using Saleor as an out-of-the-box solution more straightforward. Some of these changes became more complex than originally anticipated, meaning we essentially locked ourselves in a situation where we were unable to ship a stable release for much longer than we had originally hoped to. While we can’t wait for the 2.10 to be released later this week our minds are already on the following topics:

• Return us to a regular release schedule, ideally published monthly;
• Bugfix point-releases will appear as needed, decoupling critical bug fixes from larger feature-driven releases;
• We’re also looking for ways to allow the community to shape Saleor’s future more directly, including options to directly sponsor the prioritization of certain features;
• Tighten relationships with partners who build solutions using Saleor, including direct communication over Slack (please let me know if you’re interested).

Simultaneously over the last few months we have worked hard on:

• Improved support options for Saleor OSS users, including premium support and LTS branches;
• Saleor Cloud — sandboxes access will be out with 2.10;
• Revamped Developers’ Guide — developer experience is our priority and the first version of new documentation is already available here.
• Greater support for third-party integrations — including an upcoming Saleor App Marketplace.

• Performance improvements

As always, thank you for your support and contribution to Saleor. It takes a village to forge great software! We’re constantly curious about how you use Saleor, what are your favourite parts and above all what are the biggest pain-points.

Thank you!