Vendure: 2022 In Review

2022 In Numbers

Let's start off with some raw stats before we dive into some highlights from this year:

• 5 minor versions released

• 21 patch versions released

• 805 commits to the Vendure repo

• 66 community PRs merged

• 100 contributors

• Over 10,000 monthly downloads on npm

• Over 1,800 Slack community members

• 7 international conferences and community events

• 15 videos published on our YouTube channel

We made Vendure even better

The five minor releases this year - v1.5 to v1.9 - saw Vendure grow into the most feature-rich, flexible, and powerful open-source headless commerce solution out there.

We got Stripe integration, support for next-generation image formats & custom GraphQL scalars, draft orders, bulk actions, custom history entries, powerful extensions to order handling and many, many more new features. Moreover, we shipped several major performance improvements as well as hundreds of bug fixes, and further expanded our extensive developer docs.

To get you started rapidly, we also expanded our range of storefront starters to include Remix, Angular, Qwik and - most recently - SvelteKit!

From a technical standpoint, we're entering 2023 as the best choice for building custom e-commerce applications - and we're just getting started!

We founded a company

As well as the technical progress on the Vendure framework itself, in July David and I founded Vendure GmbH in order to guarantee the continued success of the open-source project. After running Vendure as a solo project for several years, it was a huge relief to suddenly gain David's skills and experience, as well as the know-how and eye for detail of our COO Max.

With this new company, we can provide better support to our large enterprise users, dedicate more resources to growing the community, develop new training materials, and support our growing list of agency partners around the world.

We already signed our first enterprise support contract with a Fortune 500 company, and we're fielding constant inquiries from companies of all sizes looking to build ambitious commerce applications.

We launched the Partner Program

In August, we launched our Partner Program and started onboarding our first batch of partner agencies and certifying their developers.

In the coming year we'll continue to expand this program and open up our partner listing pages, as well as working on new technical and sales resources for our partners.

As Vendure further establishes itself as a solid foundation for modern, powerful commerce applications, we look forward to working with our growing network of partners to help merchants of all sizes to realize their vision.

Plans for 2023

Although we achieved a lot in 2022, the coming year will see Vendure reach a whole new level!

Our major focus right now is to complete the planned features for Vendure v2.0. We've taken all that we've learned from the past several years of battle-testing Vendure in all manner of production projects, and we're planning on a set of features which will clearly set Vendure apart as the obvious choice for ambitious headless commerce applications.

You can see what's planned in our Product Roadmap and Technical Roadmap. Some highlights include first-class support for building multivendor marketplaces, multiple stock locations, bundle products, and a refreshed admin ui. On that last point, we're already working with our partners Rush Hour Digital on our initial design mockups, and interating on ideas based on close feedback from some of our most active community members and largest users at IBM, Swile, Pinelab, and other active agencies.

We'll also be launching our plugin marketplace in 2023. We've already been testing a number of the planned paid plugins in closed beta with a selection of partners and early-adopters, and we can't wait to be able to open up some really powerful functionality to the entire Vendure community!

Thank you Vendure community!

To close, I'd like to thank the Vendure community. As an open-source project, Vendure would not be where it is today without the support of the individual developers, technical leaders and forward-thinking agencies that have adopted and contributed to Vendure.

On a personal note, I feel lucky to be able to meet and collaborate with so many of you on Slack, GitHub, and increasingly in person.

Here are the top community contributors to the Vendure repo for 2022:

Alexander Shitikov, Martijn van de Brug, Vinicius Rosa, Alexis Vigoureux, Artem Danilov, Sebastian Geschke, Steffen Wilking, jacobfrantz1, Hendrik Depauw, Kevin Mattutat, Martin Repta, Thierry Tournie, Teresa Wienk Borgert.

And a special mention must go to Timur Dogan, Giorgio Boa and Scott Spence for their incredible work on our Remix, Qwik and SvelteKit storefront projects.

Community goes beyond code contributions too. For example, Chris Bongers closed his epic run of 1000 daily blog posts with a whole series on Vendure! If you ever reported an issue, answered a question on GitHub or Slack, provided some feedback, spread the word about Vendure to your colleagues, friends or followers - thank you!

Here's to an incredible 2023!