Despite the Easter holidays, April was packed with events, technical improvements, and overall efforts from our team. From our first-ever US meetup in New York to engaging gatherings across Europe, we’ve witnessed growing momentum in connecting Sylius developers around the globe, while we have continued improving the platform. Let’s dive into this month’s highlights and celebrate the progress we’ve made together.
In Sylius 2.1, we kicked off a major milestone: replacing PHPSpec with PHPUnit tests. 🛠️ It’s not just a tech refresh – it’s a crucial move that clears the path for PHP 8.4 support and brings us closer to a faster, more modern, and maintainable codebase. Along the way, we also bumped Symfony to version 7.2, keeping Sylius aligned with the latest and greatest from the Symfony ecosystem.
Beyond the core, we tightened up our Behat testing builds across the board. The result? Faster, more reliable pipelines and fewer “why is CI angry again?” moments for developers. ⚡️ A small move in theory, but a big leap for day-to-day efficiency and sanity.
On the licensed packages front, we didn’t slow down either. In Sylius Plus, B2B Kit, and Marketplace Suite, we delivered multiple refinements – from smoother upgrade paths, through dependency updates, to UI and stability improvements – all aimed at making scaling with Sylius even easier and more predictable for growing businesses.
And one more exciting highlight: Mollie Plugin is now officially under our care! 🤝 After taking it over from Mollie, we rolled out full Sylius 1.14 support and went deep with a heavy refactor to clean up and modernize the codebase. It’s the first milestone in our expanded partnership with Mollie – and just the beginning of what’s coming.
SyliusDays returns to Paris for its third edition on May 22-23, 2025, at Smile HQ. This free two-day event brings together the Sylius community to explore the latest innovations in open-source eCommerce development. Organized in partnership with SensioLabs and Platform.sh, it promises to deliver a 100% technical program, designed for developers and other Sylius fann with some technical knowledge.
Day 1 Speaker Lineup:
The second day features a workshop led by Gracjan Józefczyk, offering his “Sylius Practical Essentials – From Zero to Hero” full-day session. Perfect for both beginners and experienced developers, Gracjan will cover configuration, customization, and real-life examples through live coding exercises.
Keep in mind that registration is required for each day separately – attend one or both based on your interests. Secure your spot now at sylius.com/sylius-days and see you soon!
Next, we’re transitioning from PHPSpec to PHPUnit for unit testing in the Sylius Core. While PHPSpec has served us well, standardizing on the industry-leading PHPUnit framework brings significant advantages to our ecosystem.
This change lowers the entry barrier for new contributors, simplifies maintenance by consolidating all testing into one tool, improves compatibility with modern development tools like GitHub Copilot, and ensures long-term sustainability as PHPUnit continues to be actively developed while PHPSpec has stagnated. This move reflects our commitment to making Sylius more accessible and efficient for everyone in our community – from core team members to contributors and the growing number of developers building on our platform.
What’s more, we’ve managed to slash our automated end-to-end BDD test suite build time by 70.2%! If you’re using Behat for testing, you’ll definitely want to hear about this.
For those who might not know, at Sylius, we translate user stories into automated tests through BDD testing. This approach not only helps our business and development teams communicate better but also introduces a standardized process with fewer regressions.
We’ve been doing this on quite a large scale – our core open-source project includes around 4,500 scenarios, and we provide an infrastructure that our adopters can extend. Recently, we made these builds significantly faster by implementing a few clever tricks that anyone using Sylius with Behat can apply.
How did we do it? Two main improvements made all the difference:
First, we streamlined scenarios requiring JavaScript execution by simplifying them and moving redundant parts to PHP (reducing JS scenarios from 900 to just 429). Second, we improved test stability by reducing false positives that previously caused frustration and unnecessarily extended the testing process.
What does this mean for you? No more waiting for ages between pull requests, reduced CI/CD costs, and as a bonus – a more eco-friendly development process with lower CPU and RAM usage. Who knew saving resources could be so satisfying?
Sylius family is growing! We’re happy to welcome Marc Laszczyński as our new Country Manager for France! He brings his enthusiasm and expertise to strengthen our presence in the French market. Marc is eager to connect with community members, so don’t hesitate to reach out to him for a chat about all Sylius-related things.
Welcome to the team, Marc! 💪
April was a hot month for the Sylius community! From Amsterdam to Montpellier, Cologne to New York, and Warsaw to Toulouse, we’ve been busy connecting with developers, partners, and eCommerce professionals all around the world.
Our first Sylius US Community Meetup is behind us! Held on April 25th in New York, this event introduced Sylius to the American market as a fresh alternative to platforms like Magento, Shopify, and WooCommerce. However, it turned out that even in New York, there are people who actively use Sylius, which was a pleasant surprise for us!
The workshop format, led by Przemysław Ptasiński (Team Leader at Mytheresa and Sylius consultant), proved to be the perfect approach, focusing on practical skills rather than theory. Participants learned based on real-world scenarios, from customizing models to implementing CRUD functionality and leveraging Sylius’s state machine for automation. With our CEO, Mikołaj Król, also present, this debut event demonstrated significant potential for Sylius in the US market. We believe it’s just the beginning of a great journey! 🤞
Moving on, on April 17, our partners Gally and Smile hosted a Sylius meetup for the French Community in Montpellier! The event featured insightful presentations from Emil Janiszewski, Alexandre Haroutunian, Romain Ruaud, Sabrine Ferchichi, and Fabio Hassid & Pavel Petrov that delivered a great dose of Sylius-related knowledge and around the same dose of good humor. :
Attendees were treated to a diverse range of topics, including Sylius 2.0’s new features and roadmap, innovative AI integration strategies for eCommerce, advanced searchandising optimization techniques, detailed technical perspectives on the platform, and effective methods for leveraging data in business operations.
The enthusiasm throughout the evening highlighted the vibrant nature of the French Sylius community. Thank you to all the participants for your energy and enthusiasm – we look forward to seeing you again soon! 🙌
We’re proud to share that Mollie invited our Sylius Academy Trainer, Gracjan Józefczyk, to speak at their 7th edition of the Mollie Developer Meetup that took place in Amsterdam on April 10. While Henrique Di Lorenzo, VP of Product at Mollie, shared valuable company updates during the first session, Gracjan delivered his presentation “A developer’s perspective on eCommerce done right.”
Drawing from his extensive experience as both an eCommerce developer and online store owner, Gracjan took on the challenge of condensing years of eCommerce knowledge into a concise 20-minute presentation. He focused on the three most critical factors that determine eCommerce project success, sharing practical insights that resonated with the technical audience.
What made Gracjan’s talk particularly valuable was his emphasis on learning through practical experience. This practical approach mirrors his teaching philosophy in the Sylius Practical Mastery Course, which he developed to help developers tackle real-world eCommerce challenges through exercise-based learning.
Following the formal sessions, attendees enjoyed networking opportunities with food and drinks, creating connections that strengthen the developer community.
Since not everyone had a chance to attend the event, Gracjan prepared a short write-up in his post 🎓
On April 8, another Sylius meetup took place at our Professional Solution Partner office in Cologne – WilMa. The gathering brought together developers to explore Sylius as a compelling alternative in today’s eCommerce market.
WilMa highlighted the platform’s key strengths, including API-first architecture, headless capabilities, and freedom from revenue-based licensing fees. Attendees also learned about Behavior Driven Development methodology and how it can create more understandable, testable code for eCommerce projects.
The team shared their experience with a major Sylius 2 implementation that integrates PIM and ERP systems, showcasing their expertise in the DACH region.
Thank you for organizing such an informative event and spreading the word about Sylius, WilMa! 💪
Przemysław Połeć represented Sylius at this year’s Meet Commerce Polska event on April 14, along with our friend Jakub Leśniewski from BitBag! The conference brought together eCommerce professionals from across different sales models: businesses that have built their success primarily online and are looking to expand offline, traditional retailers seeking to strengthen their digital presence, and companies already operating through multiple channels but facing challenges in creating unified experiences.
The event featured high-quality presentations and panel discussions from industry experts, making it one of the most professional eCommerce conferences in Poland. It provided an excellent platform for networking and knowledge exchange, with attendees ranging from enterprise-level companies to mid-market businesses and small local stores.
Once again, big Kudos for organizing such a valuable event with renowned speakers sharing tons of knowledge.
We extend our thanks to everyone who engaged in conversations with us during the event, and we look forward to connecting again at future industry events!
Now, let’s focus on what’s ahead.
We’re thrilled to announce the return of the Sylius Party to the beautiful “Ville Rose” of Toulouse for its third consecutive year!
Mark your calendars for June 19, 2025, for a day dedicated to community, open source, and Sylius. This event offers the perfect opportunity to attend inspiring conferences from industry experts, including Antoine Bluchet, Joachim Løvgaard, Grégoire Pineau, and Piotr Szymański; connect with members of the Sylius community and explore Toulouse’s rich heritage and vibrant atmosphere. The event will also feature an engaging panel discussion on open source eCommerce challenges moderated by Emil Janiszewski, followed by hackathon for creating, testing, and innovating together. The day will finish with an evening event in Toulouse, providing additional networking opportunities in a relaxed setting.
Here you can register for free to secure your spot
Let’s not forget about the plugin updates from our partners.
Here are the really helpful articles from April. See it for yourself!
And here’s what our amazing community shared about Sylius on social media in April:
What a month! The time of April flew by so quickly. It’s been incredibly rewarding to see our community come together at events across Europe and make our first steps into the US market. All these gatherings, combined with the steady stream of technical improvements and growing adoption of Sylius, show just how vibrant our ecosystem has become. We’re grateful to everyone who contributed their time, expertise, and enthusiasm this month – you’re what makes Sylius special. Looking ahead to May, we’re excited about SyliusDays in Paris and Sylius Party in Toulouse, where we’ll have even more chances to connect and learn from each other.
Thanks for being part of our journey, and we can’t wait to see what we’ll accomplish together next!
