We are happy to announce that Sylius v1.0.0-alpha.1 is now available.
This is a huge milestone for our community and I have never been more excited!
This release is still not recommended for production, although previous versions have been successfully live for multiple years now with experienced Symfony teams involved.
I created Sylius project over 5 years ago, it was a set of decoupled bundles for Symfony, an experiment and a piece of code for my personal use. In 2013 development of the main platform has begun. 1.0.0.alpha version is a result of over 12,000 commits from more than 340 code contributors and countless people helping with testing, reporting bugs and sharing ideas. Over 4,000 Pull Requests and almost 2,500 issues. What is even more crazy, almost 600 people participated in translating Sylius UI through the CrowdIn platform.
We had 16 previous releases so far, but this one is different. Based on our experience from doing business and development with Sylius at Lakion, we have reworked the platform to allow using its full potential. The enormous activity during the last 12 months resulting in 800 new Behat scenarios with over 8,000 steps represents what we call Sylius v1.0.0 Alpha!
Sylius is not a monolithic solution. It is the first eCommerce framework that can be the foundation for your custom application tailored to your business requirements. We understand how Technical Debt can slow down and kill the company growth. That’s why Sylius follows SOLID principles and is created with high productivity in mind. It is built by developers, for developers. Constructed from standalone components, available to use as a whole or a bunch of elements, which you can use to build your own solution from scratch.
The whole eCommerce logic is based on the State Machine concept and every single aspect of how Sylius works is implemented according to the Single Responsibility Principle. That means you can customize it with ease and have full control over your store.
Thanks to the fact, that Sylius is based on Symfony, we became a part of huge community of developers. Drupal, eZ Publish, Akeneo PIM and other great projects use the same foundation. Thousands of bundles are available to use already, integrating you with ElasticSearch, Twilio, RabbitMQ and more…
For those who do not know Sylius at all or have not checked it out in 2016, here is a quick overview of what has changed:
You can access our online demo here: demo.sylius.org. To use the admin interface, go to demo.sylius.org/admin and use “[email protected]” and “sylius” as password.
Few months ago, together with Magda we have finally started serious work on the documentation of Sylius. Lack of documentation has always been a problem, but now things look way better! We have an almost complete Book chapter, which helps to understand how Sylius works internally and what kinds of functionalities are available to you as a developer.
What is more, we have prepared the Customization Guide, which contains tutorial articles with some common customizations. How to override a template, controller or even a flash – all of this is now documented!
Also, we finally have more Cookbook articles about configuring PayPal, using the API, sending custom e-mails or even adding a new model to admin interface.
That being said, there is still plenty of work to be done. We continue to add more content and we need your help! You can try out Sylius and let us know what you think, what is missing in the docs, what kind of articles you would like to see and what is unclear. Proofreading and reviewing Pull Requests is also very helpful. If you want to contribute to the documentation – go straight to our Contributing Guide!
You can read the docs here.
Sylius is constantly being translated into various languages by volunteers. The process happens on the CrowdIn platform (which is awesome) and now it is the best time to join the effort! Translation keys are almost frozen, we are adding just a few more in the coming weeks, but everything is ready to be translated. It is really simple, just join us on translate.sylius.org and your translations will be included in future releases, including BETA and stable 1.0.0!
We need your help more than ever. We are going to add some more features and do small BC breaks in the next couple of weeks, but we need you to test the platform and give us feedback. Download it, install, browse the code, try our demo and let us know what you think. You can use GitHub issues to report bugs, jump to our Gitter and chat with the core team or just drop me an e-mail to [email protected].
This will help us make Sylius even better and prepare for the stable release!
You can install and try the latest Sylius by running the following commands:
$ composer create-project -s alpha sylius/sylius-standard project
$ cd project
$ npm install
$ npm run gulp
$ app/console sylius:install
$ app/console server:start
$ open http://127.0.0.1:8000
Our team is still working on migrating some of the functionalities to the new UI, among them are product reviews, associations, address book and improved sorting in admin. We are focused on bug fixing and waiting for your feedback. Alpha is ready for starting a project for Symfony teams. We are going to break the BC only if really needed and document everything properly in the UPGRADE file.
BETA is still scheduled for November, Sylius has been battle tested for a long time. How long the beta stage will take? I don’t know, but with your help and feedback the 1.0.0 release can be just in time for rocking the eCommerce technology world in 2017.
We are also working on a completely new Sylius.org!
This kind of release is a huge thing for an Open Source project, but also personally for me. I want to thank all contributors, supporters, advisors and everyone involved, you are great! This blog post is already long and there is still crazy amount of work ahead of us, but I need to say this one big “Thank you!” to the amazing Lakion team. These guys are the true heroes behind this release and I am proud to be a part of such an amazing team. Now we get back to work and see you on GitHub! 😉
