It’s been an exciting year full of victories and lessons learned. 🙂
2017 is when we founded the dedicated Sylius company and released the first stable version of the framework. 2018 is the year when both the business and community flourished in great harmony, of which I am extremely proud.
Before I dive into details of what happened last year, here is a quick TL;DR:
We have released 3 new versions of the Sylius eCommerce Framework, which included many anticipated features like:
What is more, you can influence the future developments with our Public Product Roadmap.
The daily installations reached ~500, compared to ~250 peak installs in 2017. According to ecommwar.com (GitHub stars ranking), Sylius framework is #3 eCommerce for PHP and #5 in general.
The way people peacefully collaborate with each other is both beautiful and complex. In the search for better ways than anything that conventional wisdom offered, I decided to release the power that comes with my authority of a boss. I have not regretted it even once, despite new challenges that come with this innovative approach. On the 13th of March, we have ratified the Holacracy Constitution and began our transformation, about which you can read in my past blog posts:
P.S. If you live in Łódź or would like to move, we are recruiting. 😉
Our big focus of 2018 was to figure out who and how we should support when it comes to Sylius implementations. The transition from the software house business model to a software vendor is a challenge. We have positioned ourselves as an eCommerce framework and not a CMS. This means Sylius works out best for companies who build highly customized eCommerce solutions for the mid-market and larger organizations. To better support such projects we have designed Sylius eCommerce Adoption Choreography, which is a recommended happy path (including various consulting and support services) to leveraging our framework’s full potential.
We have also introduced Sylius Enterprise Subscription, which is a form of partnership between us as a vendor and customers relying on our technology to transact online. As part of it, we provide technical support but also look for general win-win to make both businesses better when it comes to eCommerce via strategic consulting, involvement in the product development and executing the recommended implementation choreography.
A big part of the Sylius professionalization effort was building the Solution Partner Program. Started in January last year with 8 initial partners, we managed to grow it to 22 amazing companies with extensive eCommerce & Sylius experience. This network has been the source of significant feedback to our product development, community-building, business, and pretty much everything positive and Sylius-related.
In 2019, we want to engage our Solution Partners even more by making it easier for them to help their customers benefit from eCommerce innovation.
We have standardized our training programs and trained over 140 developers through commercial and community workshops. The average willingness to recommend such training to a friend has been 9.1/10 and our trainers have been rated whopping 9.6 points out of 10. We also did workshops at meetups and conferences like PHPers Summit, PHPkáři and SymfonyCon.
If you would like one of the Sylius creators to visit your company and train your developers, let’s get in touch.
In February, we launched our brand new website, which has been evolving during the year. We are now iterating on it in-house and will make it more and more useful to our entire community. Our Twitter account has passed the 5000 followers milestone and our blog has finally seen an increase with useful content presenting new features, community news and other stuff. What is more, we have distributed a lot of t-shirts, mugs, and swag!
More than 1,800 registered users in our Slack makes it a busy place for our community with exciting discussions happening every day. What is interesting, even if you are not a developer, you can find something compelling there. We share eCommerce tips, discuss performance, SEO, integrations and many eCommerce “managers” could be surprised how useful it is to hang out there. 🙂 You can join via sylius.com/slack. Thanks to our amazing Solution Partners, regular user groups started to flourish in many places, like Toulouse Sylius User Group in France.
5 new Partners have joined Sylius in 2018 and we have moved to a new office in October, a huge 3-floor house with a lovely garden. We are ready for new friends in 2019. 🙂 Some of us got engaged, some of us got married! 3 people have graduated.
First of all, I’d like to thank our entire team. I’m proud that I can be part of Organisation full of such passionate and motivated people. 🙂
As mentioned above, Sylius is possible thanks to the fact that we are not alone as a bunch of young technologists from Eastern Europe. Big kudos go to all our Solution Partners, businesses which support the development of the product and our ecosystem. This growth would not be possible without our customers, especially companies like Brille24 GmbH who have contributed greatly to our ecosystem, both financially and with their extensive eCommerce experience.
Last but not least, a big “Thank you! <3” goes to all the amazing individual members of our community who organize events, contribute to the code and documentation, support newcomers in Slack and make this whole adventure fun and full of friendly people. 🙂
Let’s rock in 2019!
