Summer is a busy time of year for me. In the face of camping, bike adventures, various fun with pals, and of course work, I've fallen behind on writing Skill Issue. I probably won’t get a newsletter out next week (because I’ll be riding my bike to Salt Spring Island with friends) or the week after (bikepacking on the Sunshine Coast) either.

Work continues on Solidus, though. Since Solidus is a fork of Spree, I'm always keeping an eye on what the Spree folks are up to. They've been pushing a ton of changes lately. That's great for keeping up the hype around Spree. Solidus might look slightly less active at first glance, but if you look at the PRs, you'll notice something.

It’s nearly all one person and the work is very obviously AI-generated. I'm not a fan of this strategy, but I’m not here to judge. They've certainly done a better job than we have at shipping features that build excitement around their project.

But Solidus is far from stagnant. Our project's focus has always been on quality, continuity, upgradeability, and compatibility. Solidus continues to improve, but we could stand to ship more hype-building features to attract new users to the platform.

Recent work on Solidus has been dominated by folks scratching their own itches. Our biggest new feature is an example of this: Martin was working on a store that hit the limits of the existing promotion system. He built Solidus Promotions as a solution.

Solidus now has an even more flexible and powerful promotion engine and the migration path is nearly frictionless. Martin solved the problem he was facing and made Solidus better for everyone in the process.

That’s an important part of building on an open-source platform like Solidus. When the software doesn’t meet your needs, you’re able to reshape it in ways that benefit the whole ecosystem.

Unfortunately, not all the problems we face lead to exciting features like Solidus Promotions. Much of our itch-scratching brings incremental changes and quiet compatibility improvements.

So I’ve been thinking hard about what the next big features for Solidus are. I've been having conversations around the Solidus world, listening to what organizations need next. I’ve been meeting with our team, asking them about where their clients' pain points are and what features they need.

We’ve begun the work of planning out what Solidus v4.8 (coming soon!) looks like, what’s going to make it into v4.9, and the vision for Solidus v5. Our roadmap is public.

If you’re using Solidus and have thoughts on any of that, ping me in the Solidus Slack, reach out to me over socials, send me an email, or just reply to this newsletter. I’d love to hear how Solidus could better serve you.

I love heavy metal that sounds like the members of the band have a Dungeons & Dragons campaign on the go and might have read more Michael Moorcock novels than me. Swords and sorcery fantasy metal.

If you like that too, I have good news: Ironflame dropped a new record.

IRONFLAMEWorlds to Conquer