Announcing Spree 4.7 and a Spree Roadmap Update
We are excited to announce the release of Spree 4.7!
The latest version is a technological upgrade, that brings compatibility with the latest version of Ruby on Rails – 7.1. Alongside this major update, Spree 4.7 includes various bug fixes, improvements and cleanups of the internal structure of Spree Core. Additionally it further reduces our reliance on the deface gem.
Starting with Spree 4.7, developers now have the ability to add new UI elements, like menu items, action buttons and tabs into the admin panel, without the need to override the built-in templates. The newly introduced customization interface in Spree Backend allows both extensions and applications using Spree to modify the UI via code in initializers, which further improves maintainability of Spree-based applications.
Spree Roadmap Update
It’s been a year since we’ve published the last version of Spree’s roadmap. During that time, we delivered numerous improvements to Spree, including:
- Compatibility with the latest versions of Ruby (3.2) and Rails (7.1)
- Built-in support for translations, to support Spree users in international expansion
- A modern CLI, that makes it easy for developers to start new Spree-based projects
We’re currently in the final stages of developing Spree 5.0. In the upcoming months, expect a refreshed version that brings support for Stripe Payment Element and Bulk Promo Codes.
We would like to use this occasion to present our plans moving forward. There are three main goals that we would like to achieve:
- Keep improving the support for B2B businesses and introduce features for improving customer retention out of the box. Spree already comes with a powerful promotion engine and pricing capabilities, but it’s time to enhance them even further, to support modern business cases.
- On the technology side, we plan to gradually improve the internal architecture of Spree, to make scaling customized codebases easier. Spree is built for ultimate customization, but we’ve noticed that relying on e.g. extensive monkey patching of Spree’s internals can pose some challenges in scaling. One of our goals is to make customization more structured and rely on dedicated extension points rather than patches.
- Keeping backwards compatibility wherever possible, to ensure smooth upgrades. We know that historically some breaking changes in the business logic caused problems when upgrading to new versions of Spree. We’re aiming to make breaking changes properly planned, with a proper deprecation notice.
When it comes to more precise development plan, we’ve decided to focus on the following items in the next releases:
- Spree 5.1 – The goal of this version is to make it easier to build complex checkout scenarios. This version will include:
- Shareable payment links, useful for B2B businesses
- Custom payment method availability rules, to give more flexibility in accepting payments
- Gift cards support, to improve user’s retention and support marketing activities
- Spree 5.2 – With this version we plan to make further improvements to support for a B2B business model, including:
- Customer groups, to enable building complex customer-specific promotion and pricing rules
- Price lists, that will make it easier to manage pricing tiers
- Refreshed UX of the Promotions admin panel, to make it easier to use the complex engine inside Spree
- Spree 5.3 –With the goal to improve support for product customizations, add predefined admin roles and architecture for imports/exports
- Product addons and bundles, to support scenarios that go beyond what variants offer
- Predefined admin roles, to make it easier to manage access to the admin panel when the organization grows rapidly
- Architecture for imports/exports, for interoperability with other tools
We’re constantly monitoring the needs of our community, and as a result, we might introduce some additional changes to the plan.
To make it easier for everyone to keep track of the current progress, we’ve also published an overview of the roadmap on Github.
We’re always happy to include your contributions in Spree’s releases. Please take a look at the contribution guidelines if you’d like to participate. You can also find a list of open issues in our Github repository.
