Vue Storefront 1.12 has just landed! The leading topics for the latest major release of VSF1.x were: performance, an additional Storefront UI based theme, and a new CLI interface. 

During the 9 months from the last stable release, we’ve included more than 50 new improvements and a lot of optimizations and stabilization fixes.

The major focus for this release was put on the performance. We changed the way attributes are now loaded. They’ve been embedded within product feeds so no additional request is required. Moreover, the way attributes now works makes generating dynamic filters and performance of filtering the products much better.

The `vue-storefront-api` and `storefront-api` can also compact and compress the outputting JSON objects to lower the network loads.

Additionally, we’ve put a lot of energy into lowering the bundle size. Some features, have been moved to separate modules and to the theme level). We’ve also refactored the Vuex modules for the product catalog and shopping cart. They’re mostly backward compatible with VSF1.11; however, the internals and how the actions work have changed. At times the change is quite radical as we’ve moved parts of the business logic into `vue-storefront-api` instead.

Moreover, the Fastly, Varnish, and nginx cache modules—including dynamic, tag-based invalidation—have been added.

Read more about all the performance improvements

New Capybara Theme

Vue Storefront works at its fastest on the Capybara Theme, which is based on the Storefront UI design system. The important fact anyone working with Vue Storefront will notice is that the theme itself is no longer a part of the core. We’ve moved the default theme into the vsf-default repository and Capybara into vsf-capybara in order to streamline the software updates and development process management. Both themes are fully supported by VSF 1.12. Moreover, the Capybara theme is a great starting point for new contributors. We’ve created a curated list of Good First Issues that will let you easily start contributing to the project!



New CLI

Because we wanted the themes to be now separated, we tweaked the CLI and now the CLI is the default way for creating a new project.

LTS

Vue Storefront 1.11.x will be supported under the LTS for at least the coming year. If you’re in the middle of a project, you can safely run it; if you’re starting a new one, consider using VSF 1.12. The upgrade process should be pretty straightforward as long as you haven’t modified the internals of standard Vue Storefront Vuex actions (which got refactored with this release). 

Vue Storefront 1.13

The next version is planned for the Q1/Q2 2021. We’re committed to upgrading the `vue-storefront-api` to `storefront-api` as a default backend system. Of course, there will be quite a lot of fixes and improvements as well. We don’t plan to extend the core by the new features; however, you may expect a lot of them to be added as custom or third-party modules. Our strategy is to continue the steady stream of optimizations into the core but rather not develop it horizontally. 

You may also expect a lot of new features and integrations in the Next and Shopware PWA streams.

Other news from the core team

During the preparations of VSF 1.12, Vue Storefront Next got out of the R&D stream and we’ve released a Shopware PWA Beta. It’s now being developed under the `next` branch in the main Vue Storefront repository. We’re pretty excited about the new integrations that are coming to VSF Next including About You, commerce tools, Shopify and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Vue Storefront 1.x is still the best PWA for Magento and that is not going to change. If you’re running a new project against a different backend, consider choosing Vue Storefront Next. It will probably make the integration much easier, especially as there is no middleware and native data formats.

New website

Along with this new VSF release, we’ve refreshed our main website: https://vuestorefront.io. You can now find much more information about our partners and their profiles there. We also added a few dozen new live projects and case studies. The information about the product lines, roadmap, and integrations is also much more visible.

The Headless Security Initiative

With more than 150+ live PWA sites running Vue Storefront on production, we are committed to constantly improving and maintaining the already tight security standards, along with all the implementations our partners are making and the VSF Core itself.

We’ve just started an open-source eBook to which everyone is invited to contribute. Please visit the http://headless-security.org/ to check the best Vue Storefront Security practices, and then feel free to contribute on https://github.com/DivanteLtd/headless-security.org.

The changelog

We’ve been working since October 2019 on this release and the list of improvements and new features is pretty long! Huge thanks to Tomek Kostuch (@gibkigonzo) and Patryk Andrzejewski (@andrzejewsky) who were leading this release. Great job!

Added

Fixed

Changed / Improved