Hello! Today marks 5 years since the first stable release of Sylius and we thought it would be cool to take this opportunity to remember key milestones for our market and ecosystem! You can see how we celebrated by following the #SyliusOneZero hashtag on Twitter.
Stable release was installed about 255 times per day. Nowadays, Sylius is installed at a whopping 3.1k rate per day. We went from a few hundred small stores to over two and a half thousand production instances now, with some of the top European companies using Sylius for their online sales!
2018
➡️ Introducing the Sylius Network
➡️ Teal organization in practice
2019
➡️ We developed Sylius Plus
➡️ Online video tutorial for Sylius devs
➡️ Our own plugin and product store
➡️ How Sylius admin panel changed over time
2020
➡️ Migration to API Platform
➡️ Sylius signs industry leaders with 9-digit revenues
➡️ Flourishing in the times of plague
2021
➡️ Bonjour! We’ve a new office in France
➡️ Redesigning the Sylius Core Team
2022
➡️ We stay on the right side
➡️ SyliusCon is on!
➡️ The future of Sylius
One of the key turning points for Sylius was when we introduced Sylius Network and started certifying system integrators, technology, and hosting providers. This move provided a foundation for professionalizing the Sylius ecosystem and giving more people opportunities to earn money while working on or with Open Source software. Nowadays our network is 70+ companies strong and covers almost all of Europe.
2018 marks the time when we started diving into self-management with Holacracy. I believe it is safe to say that today, the company spearheading Sylius development is a fully self-managed partnership, with distributed authority, transparent finances, and autonomous teams. There is still a lot to improve but I think there is a lot to celebrate here as well! 🙂 At 20 people, we are efficiently delivering tremendous value to our open source and paying users.
What a year this was… Definitely, the highlight is the introduction of Sylius Plus, which helped us commercialize a lot of the open-source work that we were doing already. I believe it is quite rare for a self-funded company to stick to an Open Source philosophy for such a long time and with pure commitment, despite being a business at the same time. It can be done! For-profit + non-profit = for-purpose! We may be looking for some purpose-aligned funding in the coming years but will guard our principles with great care.
Sylius Plus is now being used by some major brands and dozens of paying customers, which funds the development and maintenance of both products. We are now modularizing Sylius Plus so it is an even more flexible option for companies of any size! You can choose the modules you need and compose a product+services package that fits your use case perfectly!
In 2019 we have also introduced the Sylius Online Course, which has undergone quite a bit of evolution already and allows you to learn Sylius from on-demand videos!
We have also launched the first version of the plugin marketplace, which is now constantly busy reviewing new plugins, some of which have to wait a pretty long time… Something to improve, maybe you can help? Let us know in the comments below!
Finally, we re-designed our admin panel. You can see how it changed below:
This is the year we started migrating our API to the API Platform and this effort continues to this day. We are nearly done and excited about all the possibilities of this excellent and popular tool.
We have managed to sign multiple enterprise customers, like Groupe Rosa, Raiffeisen NetWorld GmbH, and mytheresa.com GmbH.
In the midst of a covid pandemic, we continued to grow and expand our teams, despite the difficulties and challenges of the new reality. VUCA world will stay with us for a long while, as it seems.
Viva la France! Thanks to our Symfony roots, Sylius became really popular in France, so we decided to open an office there with amazing Kevin Bessat, who is now storming through this market with all kinds of marketing and sales initiatives.
Under the leadership of Łukasz, we have formed what I call Sylius Core Team v3 and the most exciting part is that it is a mixed team. First CT was composed of only volunteers from the community. The second CT was all employees of Sylius company. And now, thanks to our agile and self-management practices, we have formed a team that is mixed and seems to work great!
2022 started with war just next to our borders and various crises and shortages… We left our office, which has become a shelter for refugees (kudos to Tim for coordinating that!) and we switched to fully remote work to be even more sustainable.
2022 is the year of SyliusCon, our first-ever conference fully dedicated to Sylius! We are bringing together some of the top speakers and experts from our ecosystem and we hope to see you there. Agenda, venue and tickets are all available here: https://sylius.com/conference/
What is next? Join the conference and watch my keynote speech to learn more about the future of Sylius!
