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Michael Bromley
Michael Bromley

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Towards Vendure v2.0

Today sees the release of version 1.5 of Vendure, the open-source headless commerce framework. This release sees Vendure reach a point of high stability & maturity, with all major APIs completed and almost a year of bug fixes and refinements behind us.

Just 10 months after the v1.0 launch, Vendure is now being used in production in dozens of stores, from small boutique print shops to huge Europe-wide marketplaces to billion-dollar startups and yes, even giants like IBM.

With a active and growing community, Vendure is truly a mature, proven and production-ready headless commerce platform.

So what's next? Let's talk about the future. Let's talk about Vendure v2.0!

What's special about v2.0? Well, there are a number of changes and features I’d like to introduce which I cannot, since they would require breaking changes. I try my best to follow semantic versioning, which means that all v1.x.x releases should be backwards-compatible. In other words, updating the Vendure package versions should not require any changes to your existing code. So far we’ve done a pretty good job of this!

However, certain changes simply cannot be made without changing the database schema, updating dependent libraries with breaking API changes, or altering parts of the Vendure data model. Here are some examples of breaking changes which need to wait until v2.0:

  • Updating the underlying libraries that Vendure is built on to their latest versions, namely NestJS, GraphQL, Apollo Server & Angular.
  • Modifying the data model to support multiple stock locations.
  • Adding support for bundle products (allowing custom products to be assembled from disparate product variants)
  • Improving support for true multivendor marketplaces - this will be a major focus of the next version, since there is huge demand for it and there seems to be very few alternatives out there at present. If you are interested in this feature, I invite you to share ideas & feedback in this issue.
  • Removing deprecated APIs.

All of the above and more are planned for Vendure v2.0. You can see the status of these issues in our roadmap.

It is also possible to start testing these changes now by using the @next tag:

npm install @vendure/core@next
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This will install a version like 2.0.0-next.1, which reflects the major branch of the Vendure repo. Changes in these pre-release versions can be found in the CHANGELOG_NEXT.md file. I’m using the @next version in my own Vendure projects, but the usual caveats about using pre-release software apply!

I have no set timeline for the release of v2.0, but I would expect it to be ready within the next six months 🤞.

Thanks for reading, and if you'd like to find out more about Vendure, head over to our Getting Started guide.

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