What a year! That is all I can say. 2014 has been amazing for Sylius project. We have made great progress and built the foundation for an e-commerce revolution.
For me, personally, last year has been a great challenge, but brought me a huge amount of experience, new ideas and most importantly… I’ve met many amazing and smart people.
I can’t even imagine what will happen in 2015, but I am so excited to finally release Sylius 1.0.
First of all, I would like to thank every single person involved. You are awesome.
I have discovered the Open Source culture together with the initial preview releases of Symfony2 and I got totally hooked.
Sylius is my first open source project ever and I am speechless when I realize that:
Huge thank you to my friends from the Sylius Core Team: Alexandre, Arnaud, Daniel, Julien, Joseph, Maksim and Sasha!
At the end of 2013, I gave my first talk ever, called “Immersion in the Sylius”, at SymfonyCamp UA in Kiev, Ukraine. Since then, I have presented Sylius at 12 different conferences and events all across the Europe. There are many great things about going to conferences, but the most important one is meeting people!
I started with Behat community in London, it was a great occasion to finally meet GitHub friends in real life and share our experience regarding Behavior-Driven-Development applications in the Open Source sphere.
Next stop was Oslo, in Norway, where I had the pleasure to meet the eZ Publish community. eZ Days International has been an amazing event and I was excited to give a talk there. The day has also kickstarted some great ideas about Sylius and eZ Publish integration.
September was a crazy month for Sylius, I spent first week in Rovinji, Croatia, where I had conducted 2 workshops at PHP SummerCamp and met with an amazing bunch of Symfony and eZ Publish folks!
At the end of the month, together with Michał, we have traveled to London, for SymfonyLive conference. Thanks to the organizers, we had our very own open source stand, where we gave out bunch of Sylius gadgets and answered crazy amount of questions. I presented Sylius once again and we headed back to Poland, but this time I conducted Sylius workshop at the biggest PHP event in country – PHPCon Poland!
In November I talked about Sylius to Symfony Community in Sweden, at their NovemberCamp conference in Stockholm. Has been great to meet new people and listen to interesting talks!
Final stop was the biggest Symfony event in the world, SymfonyCon 2014 in Madrid, Spain.
My talk gathered a full room and I was proud to present all the work we have done on Sylius. It was the best end of the conference season!
Sylius consumes huge amount of my private and working time, but my commitment is not enough to support the vision I have for this project. I believe in Open Source and Sylius will always remain free and community based, but I have always had the entrepreneurial spirit, which allowed me to self-fund the project and build a business around it.
Together with my long time friend, Michał, we have a started a completely new brand – Lakion, a commercial entity behind the project. Sylius has been running in production for many small, medium and huge brands – They all require commercial support and this is our work. We share our knowledge by conducting consultations and trainings. What is more, we show the Sylius’ capabilities by helping people to add really crazy features into their systems. Together with Sylius and its popularity, we are growing really fast and want to grow in 2015 even more.
The great thing is that we are able to select the clients and projects, that allow us to contribute back to the platform and arrange many win-win scenarios. Additionaly, our developers help us make Sylius better by contributions to the platform during working hours.
Sylius has changed a lot during this year. I will highlight some of the most important changes:
Sylius turned into an e-commerce framework for PHP. We have separated our business logic from Symfony framework and you can use it in any project. We are already hearing voices and plans about integrating these components in Laravel and other frameworks. Hopefully our community will grow even more!
Translating a project like Sylius is another big operation on its own. While we have a lot of things to improve in the process and translations naming, we have moved to use Crowdin. translate.sylius.org has been busy and over 270 people were involved in translating Sylius. From Thai, through Chinese, to Belarusian.
With a permission from Symfony Documentation Team, we have created our own guide based on their awesome work. Our processes are very similar (almost the same) and we have included an extra part about Behavior Driven Development. Start contributing now!
Together with Chilid Agency, we have started a completely new theme for Sylius frontend. Until now, Sylius has been targeted at developers, but as we are approaching stable release, we want to impress our designer and business friends with some nicer looks. This week I will receive the last templates and will finally be able to finish my branch with the new theme and theming system!
After working on few Syilus project, this is something I totally love. Controlling all the e-commerce flows in simple files… Adding new state and workflows is so simple and I am thinking about making them configurable in the administration panel as well.
We were realistic about the possibility of developing a good CMS into Sylius. From scratch, it was impossible with our resources. SymfonyCMF is now fully integrated into Sylius, we use almost all their bundles, including the inline editing with Create.js! At Lakion, we have already used it in one project and it has been an amazing experience.
Thanks to the amazing IT team at REISS, we now have a really nice faceted search functionality in the backend. It looks badass in the new theme (coming soon):
If you like Sylius, you need to love REISS, cause they have also contributed a translatable products catalogue. There is still a lot of work to do, but it is an amazing start and Sylius finally has this important feature in the core.
SyliusResourceBundle is one of the most popular components and it has worked great for building REST APIs. We have decided to create a separate project, called Lionframe. Building JSON/XML API has never been so easy!
Our plan is quite clear, get Sylius 1.0 out as soon as possible, but make it a blast. There are few missing features, but for almost all of them we have a PR. Now it is my job to review them, finish and merge!
We are also working on the new default theme and theming system, that will be a great milestone.
Our target is to release Sylius BETA in April, this year. It will be a really complete release, with a lot of features you would not expect from such young project, but it will also be a very stable release. We are committed to SemVer, so the BETA period will last as long as we squash all the detected bugs, but our hopes are high to release 1.0 in September.
Let’s get back to work and rock this year with Sylius!
