Vue Storefront 1.6 is here! Modular architecture, CoreShop integration, performance test and more.

Last month was extremely intensive for the whole Vue Storefront community. It’s safe to say that we never worked that hard and we never achieved such a great results in any release before! Not only in terms of code but also in terms of community engagement, and new members in Vue Storefront family ;)

Release of Vue Storefront 1.6

Our goal after each release is to always end up with

new features
better Developer Experience
easier upgradability and extendibility
better performance

It’s pleasure to say that there are tons of great improvements in this release. Let’s see what’s new!

Modular architecture

New modular architecture is one of the biggest (and best) changes in Vue Storefront core. In v1.5 we introduced PoC of modules. After discussing RFC with community and agreeing on it’s final form we started working hard on splitting VS core and bringing this amazing idea to live.

Core modules Vue Storefront 1.6 — Core modules

At the end we have our monolithic application splitted into small, self-contained pieces. Each of this pieces is responsible for one feature (cart, wishlist, product catalog, user etc).

Our goal was to give as much flexibility to the users as we can and make the process of extending VS core a breeze. After seeing how our contributors started creating and using their own modules we are extremely happy to see that we certainly achieved this goal!

Here is just a part of the benefits we gained from switching to modular architecture:

much easier reasoning about application behavior (you have everything related to particular feature in one place)
common format across all functionalities and extensions— once you understand modules you understand how Vue Storefront works
ability to compose your store only from features that you need and tree shake everything else— cut off modules that you don’t need from the bundle
better and much easier upgradability
ability to extend any part of the VS Core — every module can be easily extended/replaced/adjusted to your application needs while still keeping it upgradable
much easier maintenance of VS core and ability to work on many features separately

Even though the core architecture has changed it’s not influencing themes that much and the upgrade is still pretty easy. We also introduced compatibility build which allows you to use some of the new features without making any changes in your current theme. How cool is that?

New docs!

Thanks to efforts of amazing Natalia Tepluhina (CTO of Vue Vixens) who recently became our technical writer we can proudly present our new documentation based on VuePress! Natalia rewrote and organized almost all of the docs and made them as good and approachable as it’s possible! Thank you, Natalia!

You can find our new documentation under docs.vuestorefront.io.

CoreShop integration!

With 1.6 release we added CoreShop to the list of backend platforms integrated with Vue Storefront. You can find details here and expect more platforms supported with next release!

Stress performance tests

This month we made some pretty intensive performance stress tests in Vue Storefront that ended up with great results.

We’ve achieved about 17 325 req/s with 48 348 active users at the peak with the performance test. The average error rate with all types of tests was under 1% (which is a very good result)

You can read the full case study here.

What else?

Modules and docs are without a doubt the most important change in this release but there is also a record number of new features, improvements and bugfixes thanks to our amazing community that is growing literally day by day!

CoreShop integration — @pkarw
New documentation on Vuepress! — @NataliaTepluhina
CMS Content from ElasticSearch with SSR — @yuriboyko
AMP Renderer — @pkarw
Dynamic config load — @CodeSkills
Currency sign before/after — @CodeSkills
Czech Translation — @CodeSkills
Bundle size limit config — @jahvi
Configuration that sets a maximum number of options for each filter — @nuovecode
Lazy loading for non-SSR routes — @filrak
Vue Storefront Logger — @filrak

I’m also extremely happy to welcome our new core team members that joined this month — Javier, Patryk and George! Welcome onboard guys!

You can find a full list of new features and improvements here along with migration guide.

New live shops!

It’s great to see the number of live implementations growing each month but what is even better we see that developers are very satisfied with their Vue Storefront experience! Here you can find an interview with Alek who made two shops on Vue Storefront only by himself!

This month we heard about 4 (!) new shops that made it to production!

Vue.js Wro Meetup & Vue.js Roadtrip

We not only use Vue in our projects but we are also big fans of the framework itself and its community. This is why we decided to help Polish Vue.js community and became a host of first official Vue.js Poland Meetup! The crazy thing was that the event was fully booked just after 2 days! Looks like Vue community in Wroclaw is huge!

full house in Vue.js Wro Meetup hosted in our office!

I also had a chance to talk a little bit about Progressive Web Apps with Vue during last stop of Vue.js Roadtrip in Berlin. As always it was great to learn new things and share some knowledge (and beers) with Vue.js community and what is even better it’s great to see that not only eCommerce people are fans of Vue Storefront ;)

What to expect in next release ?

We don’t want to make any revolution before New Year and we don’t want to introduce too many changes at once, so in next release of Vue Storefront we want to focus on:

stability and performance with bundle optimization and code splitting
making upgrades more seamless with abstract component API
better offline capabilities
new platforms support
…as always many small improvements and bugfixes ;)

We couldn’t make this release without our amazing contributors!
Big shout-out to everyone involved into 1.6 release:

and everyone else consistently supporting us by helping others on our slack channel!