Warning! This roadmap blog post is outdated!

The current roadmap can be found here.

Hello Sylius Community!

We left you a bit in the dark after the first stable release in September but trust me, we have been busy these last couple of months! In this blog post, I’d like to give you an overview of where we are heading as a project, what kind of features you can expect and how you can help the community grow. Before we dive into all this, let’s have a look at what happened since September.

Sylius After 1.0.0 Release

Since we released the first stable version of Sylius the average daily installations have jumped to almost 300. 2017 compared to the prior year is 136% growth. We have reached an amazing milestone of 1,000 users in our Slack community. 450 developers from all around the world contributed to our codebase and 775+ worked on the translations. We also managed to stick to our time-based release cycle and 9 patch versions have been published since then as well. Work on the features for 1.1 has continued and this release is available for you! Read more about it here. Plenty of new projects have been developed and there are more and more sites in production.

New Core Team & Community Organization

As our project & business has been growing rapidly, me being the single decision-maker became a significant bottleneck in the process. As a result, we are experimenting with a new self-managed structure in our company and we would like to apply some of the lessons learned to our community organization. The first step is defining the new roles in the Sylius Core Team. The initial structure is the following:

• Project Lead – me (focus on the business & ecosystem growth)
• Lead Developer – Kamil Kokot (focus on the technical innovation & core developments)
• Documentation Lead – Magdalena Banasiak (focus on our documentation and knowledge sharing)
• Core Team Members – Łukasz Chruściel, Mateusz Zalewski, Grzegorz Sadowski (focus on the core developments, trainings, plugins, etc.)

More distributed authority and clear responsibilities will hopefully improve our agility as the team behind Sylius eCommerce Framework.

Feature Plans

How to read this feature roadmap: Sylius is developed by a vibrant and active community combined with our in-house development efforts, which are run as agile processes. The nature of an Agile process is that things change depending on the various input and we are embracing this change. Please treat this roadmap as an indication of the direction we are heading and what kind of features have a high priority.

Our Release Cycle is time-based, so you can deduct the approximate timeframe of when a specific feature is delivered in the core. So:

• Short-term is probably in one of the next patch releases (bug fixes) or the next minor version (features);
• Medium-term can be either the next minor version or the version after this;
• Long-term is most likely a more distant feature, at least 6 months from now.

Keep in mind that depending on the growth of the community we may together deliver more features in the core or as plugins. Also, if you have an opportunity to contribute now and develop a functionality listed here as “Medium-Term”, do not hesitate to open a PR. We will be happy to merge it sooner if it meets the core quality requirements.

Short-Term

• Symfony 4
• Fully functional Docker setup
• Completely new default theme
• Better support for B2B/B2C Taxes in the EU
• Configurable URL Rewrites
• Products Comparator
• Configurable countries per Channel
• Registration during the Checkout
• Toggling Product Variants
• Recently viewed Products

Medium-Term

• Better support for Import/Export
• Better B2B support via plugins
• More flexibility in the Promotion Rules (AND/OR)
• Refunds
• Returns
• Shipping Rules
• Improved Data Audit
• Attribute Groups
• Invoice / Documents generation
• Product Templates
• Better timezones & multi-store handling

Long-Term

• Order creation in Admin
• Multi-Warehouse
• Product Bundles
• Pick-Up Locations
• POS Support in Core

Building the Business Ecosystem

Apart from the further development of Sylius, our challenge is to create a business-friendly ecosystem. Plugins, themes and great case studies do not magically appear out of nowhere. One of my main focuses since the release was to launch our partnerships programs. I’m proud to say that we are kickstarting the official Sylius Solution Partner Program next week. More in the upcoming blog post.

But that’s not all. We are also working with multiple hosting companies and other software vendors to form even more partnerships. If you would like to know more, drop us an email to partners@sylius.com.

Growing our Community

There are still a couple of essential but missing elements of what I call the “Community Engine” of Sylius. And we are working hard to add them. First of all, we are about to launch the official Sylius Community Forum. Our Slack is growing strong but with more and more people joining, it is impossible to follow all the discussions. It is more suitable for quick chats and rapid self-organization of the community members around a specific issue. But we need a place where valuable information would be easily accessible and kept for the future reference. (And indexed by search engines…)

Apart from the forum, we want to encourage developers and companies to invest time into Sylius plugin development. We have seen some great plugins developed over the last months but we are missing our “App Store” where everyone could submit their plugins/themes and either share them for free or sell. As our new website is live, the next step is adding the marketplace functionality. We hope to launch it within the next months together with an improved Plugin Development Guide.

Our community has already been amazing when it comes to organizing events and we are more than grateful. We would like to support such initiatives even better and organize more local meetups. If you would like to kick-off a Sylius community in your city – let us know via events@sylius.com. We will be glad to help with the promotion and send you some Sylius-branded swag! Also, we plan to organize the first official event this year but more news on that soon.

More Accessible Sylius Knowledge

Our documentation is comprehensive but we feel like it is not enough and we want to try to simplify the “try-out” phase for developers interested in Sylius. That’s why we will work on introducing a Quick Tour to our documentation, which would be a base tutorial that allows you to get a feeling of what it is like to develop a real project on top of Sylius. We will also reorganize the documentation structure a bit to be more friendly for newcomers. As we are expanding outside of the Symfony community, we need a simpler path from 0 to a Sylius developer hero!

As an addition, we are organizing Classroom trainings during which you can spend 3 intensive, knowledge-filled days with the members of Sylius Core Team. Based on our experience in training various in-house teams, we have developed a standard program “Getting Started with Sylius”, which will get you up to speed in Sylius development. We will announce the dates & locations very soon.

Get Involved

Want to help us and join the exciting Sylius adventure? There are now even more ways to do it and become part of our amazing community! Join our Solution Partner Network, help us with the documentation, contribute some of the features, build a plugin or just provide us with feedback on what is needed for your projects. It is that easy! 🙂