Forem: SolidusIO

The Agile Fluency Model and eCommerce

Sean Denny — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 16:02:22 +0000

Jared Norman of Super Good Software gives a great talk on agile processes at SolidusConf 2020.

Many Agile organizations are just going through the motions of their chosen process. Jared walks us through how the Agile Fluency Model applies to eCommerce businesses and how they can use it to discover where they should focus to reap the real benefits of Agile methodologies.

The 10 Best Ways to SEO Audit Your Store for Free

Sean Denny — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 21:31:31 +0000

Thomas Sample of Karma Creative shares some SEO wisdom in this workshop held at SolidusConf 2020.

A step-by-step walkthrough of an SEO Audit and a workshop to learn more about SEO. Find out what's new in 2020 and grab the low-hanging fruit for your Solidus Store. We'll focus in on the most important tips this time to make sure we see results by the end of the session.

The State of Solidus

Sean Denny — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 20:16:53 +0000

Alberto Vena of Nebulab gives us an update on our favorite open source eCommerce platform.

We've had a lot of shocks in the Solidus (and Spree) community in the last few years, and we need stability. Alberto will cover what's happened since the previous maintainers left the project, and how a group of people that care about Solidus are trying to make the platform more solid than ever.

eCommerce and Consumer Financing Opportunities

Sean Denny — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 17:36:16 +0000

Richard Gilbert from PayPal shares some insight on consumer financing.

"eCommerce and Consumer Financing Opportunities"
Consumers choose and spend more with merchants that offer consumer financing alternatives. Increase conversion rates and grow your average order value by offering more payment options. We will share statistics and approaches merchants can use to offer consumer financing solutions and why merchants should aggressively consider consumer financing strategies.

Solidus & Subscriptions: Adventures of a Publisher Trying to Disrupt Itself

Sean Denny — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 14:30:54 +0000

Rob Johnson of Deseret Book goes through why subscriptions are important, and some of the finer details behind the business logic.

"Solidus & Subscriptions"
Subscriptions have become increasingly popular due to the financial stability they produce for businesses and investors. Done right, subscriptions deliver great value for customers with draws such as unlimited access, original product and deep discounting that can often lead to increased brand affinity and lifetime value. We'll review a 2.5 year timeline of the impact subscriptions have had for a Publisher and Retailer using Solidus. We'll cover learnings around acquisition and retention, subscription usage trends, customer survey insights, upgrade experiences and the importance of empowering the customer.

Don't Panic: The Solidus Guide to ReactJS

Sean Denny — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 18:46:25 +0000

Sean Denny hits us with a workshop-style guide on implementing ReactJS with Solidus - and rebuilds an entire product page in ReactJS to boot!

"Don't Panic: The Solidus Guide to ReactJS"
How do you bring the speed of ReactJS to the flexible and scalable Solidus ecosystem? The first step: Don't panic. Sean will take you through the basics - taking a vanilla Solidus store and adding ReactJS in step by step. Follow along as we take a look at how the Solidus API interacts with React, how React routing works, and some of the benefits of using ReactJS with Solidus. Just don't forget to bring your towel.

Here's a link to the chat log, which includes the URLs and code snippets posted: https://gist.github.com/seand7565/1f47e9c90abebbf4f5c358f3a0cf7c71

Marketplace on Solidus, Helping Local Businesses

Sean Denny — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 18:36:12 +0000

Edwin Cruz from MagmaLabs takes us through struggles and triumph while detailing the work they've done on Solidus with marketplaces.

"Marketplace on Solidus, Helping Local Businesses"
Edwin will share how MagmaLabs leveraged existing open source projects such as Solidus and solidus marketplace extension to create a portal where the main goal was to help local businesses to deal with the fact that they needed to sell their products and services online in order to have better chance to survive.

The 5 W's of Application Logging

Sean Denny — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 14:10:19 +0000

Taylor Scott from Sendoso takes us to task on our application logging.

"The 5 W's of Application Logging"
Often times when we write are logs we only include the “what” and “when”. I’d like to talk about getting the most of our application logging by discussing the importance of the “Who”, “Where”, and “why”. Having logs without context can be just as bad as no logs at all.

Building Payment Provider Integrations on Solidus

Sean Denny — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 20:10:46 +0000

Peter Berkenbosch gives us the rundown on payment provider integrations with Solidus.

"Building Payment Provider Integrations"
Providing a detailed step by step technical insight on how to integrate payment service providers in your Solidus storefronts. Focus mostly on the Solidus Payment internals, but also touching the surface of development support tools and best practises.

SolidusConf 2019: the 3 reasons that made us love it

Alberto Vena — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 10:32:18 +0000

This post was originally posted on the Nebulab website here.

Nebulab is one of the most involved companies in Solidus' growth, and we
couldn't miss this year's SolidusConf in wonderful Salt Lake City.

The conference format has always been quite unique: two days of talks and two more spent hacking on Solidus with the rest of the Community on whatever could benefit our beloved open-source platform.

What better way for the community to step up and show how much they care about Solidus?

We've spent four incredible days in Salt Lake City at SolidusConf 2019, and here's a recap of what we loved the most about this conference.

1. Transversal topics content

One great thing about SolidusConf is not being too Solidus-centered. At each edition, the Solidus platform is the center of gravity naturally, but the talks cover all aspects of the eCommerce industry. This makes the conference enjoyable both for people that are new to Solidus and for experienced Solidus developers that want to look at new things.

This year was no different, and I'm proud to say that we covered topics well outside the typical eCommerce conferences. In fact, we had presentations about Tech Leadership from Ryan Cromwell, Code Quality Metrics from Ernesto Tagwerker, Accessibility from Jen Luker, Breaking Up The Band Monolith With Emotional Intelligence from Braden Douglass, and Refactoring Legacy Code from Jason Swett.

There were also tech talks on practices that are being used in Solidus apps, but which can also be employed in any Ruby on Rails application. To name a few: Taylor Scott showed How to deploy Solidus on AWS Elastic Beanstalk,automating operations with GitLab CI/CD, and Thomas Sample presented an impressive Ultimate guide on SEO techniques to improve website pages (Thomas is one of the Solidus Stakeholders, and he also made a very inspiring call for technical and financial support for the Solidus platform).

Of course, we had a few talks strongly tied to the Solidus world too. Peter Berkenbosch talked about Solidus' less-known extension points. Joel Saupe presented the work he and his team did to create a useful
Solidus JavaScript SDK that interacts with the Solidus API. Sean Denny explained how Solidus stakeholders are bringing Solidus from being dependent on a single company to being "Community-Driven Solidus", which means a self-organized, financially independent project based on community donations and volunteer work.

2. The opportunity to talk to anyone

Small conferences are fantastic because they give you the opportunity to
meet and talk to anyone involved easily: attendees, speakers, and organizers.
We had a great time discussing ideas presented in the conference talks, trying to get more information and better understand the motivations behind them.

The two late-evening parties, in particular, were ideal for this purpose. We could hang out in front of a tasty beer (well.. more than one!) in spectacular Salt Lake City spots.

The first party, sponsored by Engine, was at the Quarters Arcade Bar, a place with delicious drinks and all kinds of arcade videogames and pinballs: the perfect place for a bunch of nerds!

#SolidusConf2019 was a blast! Thank you @dhonig for sponsoring the pub night! #beerBar #BarX #SolidusConf pic.twitter.com/88gukTbamQ
— ❦ Peter Berkenbosch (@pberkenbosch) October 23, 2019

The second party, sponsored by Boomer Digital, had fewer video games, but a wider choice of high-quality local craft beers. The Beer Bar context was excellent for creating small discussion groups about Solidus, eCommerce, and our life outside this world! It was so delightful to build real human connections with people from all over the world.

3. Directional and effective for the Community

Another reason why we loved this edition is that we had the opportunity to talk to other Community members about the direction of Solidus.

This is something we discussed a lot both internally and with the rest of the Solidus stakeholders, and we couldn't be happier to share our current plans with the Community at large.

Curious to know the big news about the future of Solidus? Here you are!

Solidus Extensions

Our teammate Alessandro presented Nebulab's vision for
the future of Solidus extensions.

Extensions used to be second-class citizens, from now on they will become the standard way to build new business value for Solidus online stores.

.@alessandrocodes will walk us through the challenges #Solidus extensions currently face and how we have decided to tackle them. Ready, steady... GO! 🙌#SolidusConf2019 #SolidusConf #eCommerce pic.twitter.com/S7rrOBDIgt
— Solidus (@SolidusIO) October 21, 2019

There's so much work to do, but now that this goal is public and shared, it will be easier to accomplish it together with other Community members.

If you are curious, here are his talk's slides: https://slides.com/aldesantis/extensions-are-dead-long-live-extensions/fullscreen

Solidus Roadmap

We've also opened a discussion about the Solidus Roadmap.

It was clear that the Community was expecting something from Nebulab. Being the main contributors at the moment, we have the responsibility to direct the Community's efforts towards shared goals.

This is important for two main reasons:

It helps contributors understand how to prioritize their time;
It helps the Community understand what they can expect from the future of the platform, and how Solidus will help them meet their business objectives.

Gregor MacDougall and I, as Core Team members, did a quick lightning talk to explain the purpose and process behind the roadmap's creation. Instead of starting from the high-level needs of a single company, we created a framework that allows us to do the opposite: we analyzed the market size, segmentation, and trends, competitors, etc. ... All these data led to a SWOT analysis, that enabled us to better understand Solidus' weaknesses and threats and then how to transform them respectively into strengths and opportunities.

Some exciting updates about the new #Solidus Roadmap. 🗺️ Thanks to @AlbertoVena and Gregor MacDougall for this interesting lightning talk ⚡️#SolidusConf2019 #SolidusConf #eCommerce pic.twitter.com/ZvbOnBWQXG
— Solidus (@SolidusIO) October 22, 2019

This conversation continued on the first Hack Day, during which we had our first open stakeholders meeting ever! The main topic was the presentation of the roadmap with a more in-depth explanation of the rationale behind each topic and task.

Some highlights from these Hack Days 💻 #SolidusConf2019 #SolidusConf #Solidus #eCommerce pic.twitter.com/bwq77n2AFH
— Solidus (@SolidusIO) October 25, 2019

We are planning to publish an official Roadmap as soon as we reach a
consensus on the roadmap's priorities. If you want to have a voice in the future of Solidus, you can join the stakeholders' group with a monthly donation through Solidus' Open Collective page!

More committed than ever

For us, being part of the Solidus Community is about sharing our enthusiasm for open-source eCommerce with our fellow community members. That's why we loved attending and speaking at SolidusConf 2019. We learned a lot, and we hope that this kind of initiative will communicate how strong and cohesive the Solidus Community is.

Yesterday's hiking was amazing! 🏞️ Wonderful views and a terrific company. 🎉 Thank you, everybody! 🤗#SolidusConf2019 #SolidusConf #Solidus #SaltLakeCity pic.twitter.com/97RFamZsyp
— Solidus (@SolidusIO) October 24, 2019

I'm sure to speak on behalf of everyone in the Community when I say that we are now more committed than ever and already looking forward to the next SolidusConf!

Here are some extra pictures:

Having fun at the speakers dinner.

A quick tour at the Salt Lake Marina.

Mountains you can see from Salt Lake City.

A frame from the Roadmap discussion.

The Hack Days context was very productive.

Useful resources about Solidus:

Solidus Conf 2019 In Review

Jared Norman — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 18:25:15 +0000

This post was originally posted on the Super Good website here.

Last week, the Solidus community gathered in Salt Lake City to discuss the future of the platform and ecosystem. Over the course of four days, we discussed where we're at, where we're headed, and laid the groundwork for moving the platform forward.

The History of Solidus Conf

Solidus Conf has existed in some form since the very beginning of the project. In the spring of 2015, developers from Stembolt and Bonobos disappeared into the forest near Whistler, BC and emerged after a week with a plan and a direction for the new platform.

Every year since there's been another conference: 2016 we invaded Toronto, 2017 was across the pond in London, and last year we found ourselves talking Solidus over the best barbecue that Memphis has to offer.

It's fair to say that this is a big year for the conference and the platform, though. Last year in Memphis it was announced that Stembolt had been acquired by Juul and would no longer be stewarding the platform in their previous capacity. This meant a lot of change was coming and while we did our best to plan for the future, it was really hard to understand what this might mean for the community.

This year's conference took the same format as most previous years: two days of conference talks and two days of hack days. The presenters this year all did a fantastic job.

Day One

Thomas Sample of Karma Creative kicked things off, jamming more than one hundred SEO tips into a single talk. It was an awesome way to start the conference. Thomas does a ton for Solidus and his energy was a great way to start the conference.

Next was one of my favourite talks; Ryan Cromwell of Sparkbox spoke about "Making the Leap to Tech Lead". At Super Good, levelling up our developers is one of our main focuses and Ryan had a lot of great advice around organizing streams of work and making space for team members to grow.

The third talk was focused on how consultants might improve our ability to gauge the quality of the codebases we're jumping into. Ernesto Tagwerker from OmbuLabs presented on his new tool skunk which provides an integrated code smell/test coverage heuristic, so you can identify major code liabilies when stepping into a new project.

After that, Taylor Scott gave us a complete breakdown of the continuous integration and deployment process they use at Deseret Book. Having run Solidus (and Rails) apps on a few of Amazon's different hosting offerings, it was interesting to see how they're leveraging Elastic Beanstalk and GitLab.

For the final talk of the first day, Peter Berkenbosch went over some of the lesser known extension points in Solidus, and some cool uses for them. A lot of work goes into making Solidus more extensible, so it was great for someone to help raise up some of the lesser used extension points.

What's Next For Solidus Extensions

Before Peter's talk, we got a talk that deserves a little more attention. Alessandro Desantis from Nebulab presented on the state, direction, and plan for the Solidus's many extensions.

As I mentioned before, this was the first Solidus Conf since Stembolt stepped back from their role as the primary directors of the Solidus platform. As such, everyone was curious to see what Nebulab has been doing to continue to maintain and grow the platform. Alessandro stepped up to outline everything they were doing to keep our extension ecosystem healthy.

Firstly, they're moving all the non-core extensions into the Solidus Contrib organization. The core team of Solidus is responsible for the extensions and main gems, now all housed under the main organization. The broader community is responsible for the maintenance of everything under the contrib organization.

Before Stembolt was acquired by Juul Labs and merged into their development team, Stembolt had adopted an internal policy that all employees working at the company would be responsible for one or more Solidus extensions. This was to ensure that even lesser-used extensions had someone directly responsible for them who would respond to pull request and issues and keep them up to date.

Nebulab has implemented the same policy. While they welcome support from the community in supports the extensions in Contrib, each extension has a Nebulab developer responsible for it's maintenance. While this policy was only somewhat successful at Stembolt, Nebulab has set themselves up for success with it. Nebulab dedicates Fridays to non-client work: writing blog posts, working on internal tools, and open source work. Time of this kind of open-source work is baked into their process and it's great to see that kind of commitment.

On top of committing to keeping the ecosystem maintained, they've done some great work to make that easier for everyone. They've updated solidus_cmd to make various maintenance tasks easier and adopted a consistent README format for Solidus extensions to make it easier for those new to Solidus to understand what the extension ecosystem has for them.

They're using dependabot and Pull Reminders to stay on top of updates, as well as GitHub Changelog Generator to make sure that it's as easy as possible to upgrade all the extensions your store is using.

Finally, they're committed to addressing the issues we've talked about for a long time in the Solidus (and Spree) communities: class_eval is bad and Module#prepend isn't much better. The success of the extension ecosystem is contingent on becoming less dependent on these methods of modifying Solidus's core and providing the configuration options and extension points that real stores need. It's great to see them continuing that effort.

I was really glad to see that some serious thought is going into how we're handling extensions and that Nebulab is doing their part to keep the ecosystem up to date. That said, they're only one member of this community and they need the assistance of the rest of us to make Solidus as awesome as it can be.

Day Two

Day two featured talks from Joel Saupe on the Solidus API, Jen Luker on how we can make sure not just our products, but our companies are accessible to everyone, Braden Douglass on breaking up monoliths with microservices, and Jason Swett on how to confidently modify legacy code, something everyone work on Solidus has to do on a day-to-day basis.

We also had a lightning talk section that provided some really great insight into what the community is working on. Eric Saupe from the core team described the architecture of the point-of-sale system he's working on. Matthew Bass showed off an awesome shipping rate estimator that sidesteps the unreliable APIs they'd normally use, but still makes sure you're charging your customers the right amount.

The Roadmap

For the final lightning talk Gregor Macdougall of Juul Labs and Alberto of Nebulab (both on the Solidus core team) outlined all the work that's gone into putting together a roadmap for the project.

They went over the community survey results, reviewed independent market research, examined alternative eCommerce platforms, and used common sense to outline a laundry list of what Solidus needs to continue to grow.

There are tons of stores on Solidus today, but the more stores we can bring to the platform, the more open source contributions we can leverage to make this a better platform for everyone.

The roadmap is public and can be found here. It's a work in progress, so there'll be more prioritization and consultation to come, but it represents the next steps for the Solidus platform.

Community Driven Solidus

The final talk of the conference (and what a talk to end on) was from Sean Denny. Sean is a member of the stakeholders team and did a ton of work to make this year's conference (and last years) happen.

Sean started by outlining the history of the project and how the organization functions now, before diving into his thoughts on the next steps for Solidus. He's done a ton for this community, so when he talks about the need for greater diversity and calls on everyone to "take responsibility" for moving Solidus forward, it carries a lot of weight.

I encourage everyone in the community to go give his talk a listen once it gets posted.

The Hack Days

Hack days are a staple of Solidus Conf. They help capture the energy and enthusiasm that builds around the conference and turn that into real contributions. Having everyone in the same room helps facilitate broader discussions and provides opportunities for newcomers to the platform to get involved.

This year we saw everything from optimizations that leverage new Rails 6 features to some of our oldest issues closed. I spent my time getting the discard project cleaned up to enable us to complete the migration away from paranoia.

Open Stakeholders Meeting

The Solidus stakeholders team meets weekly to manage the project, so this week we held our meeting at the hack days and made it open to anyone who was present. Everyone at the hack day was able to voice their opinion and get a look at how things are run.

This facilitated discussions around the material in the roadmap, what might be missing, and how to best prioritize that. There'll be more to come on that as the stakeholders team continues to refine the roadmap process.

What's Next

Solidus is a community made up of store owners, consultancies, individual developers, and more. Part of our strength is that so many businesses are build on the platform and are invested in its success.

The biggest next step for the stakeholders team, the core team, and other members of the community is to finish to fleshing out the roadmap.

We're also focused on increasing the funding of the Solidus Open Collective in order to hire a full time maintainer. Many of the tasks to support that are on the roadmap, but if you run a business on Solidus, consider a recurring contribution. If you look back on the everything that John Hawthorn did for the platform, it's clear that a small investment can pay massive dividends here.

The community at large is focused on improving the extension ecosystem. Extensions enable new stores to jump onto the platform with minimal friction, so continuing to build on our robust suite of extensions is critical to the continued growth of the platform.

Finally, expect to see more regional meetups and events around Solidus. The team and community are both aligned that these events do wonders for bringing us together and helping grow the platform.

Conclusion

Solidus started when a bunch of developers wandered off into the mountains in British Columbia to try to improve the state of eCommerce on Ruby on Rails. While the locale has changed, we're still here, we're still making eCommerce better, and you better bet we're still hiking off into the woods.