This year was the first Solidus Conf that was 100% digital, thanks to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. You can see tweets on Twitter via the hashtag #SolidusConf2020
The Solidus community is fairly small, although the project currently has over 3.3k stars on Github. It's one of the leading open source Ecommerce platforms for the Ruby on Rails stack, the other being the original Ecommerce project, Spree.
Spree vs Solidus
Spree was the original open source Ecommerce project, but it was purchased by another company who worked toward monetizing service integrations through a for-profit, optional service, called Wombat, which took the direction of Spree toward a more inherently commercial direction. This toubled a number of developers and open source advocates, who depended on Spree for many of their clients.
In response to this directional change, a group of agencies and retailers who relied on Spree decided to fork Spree 2.4 and combine resources to ensure the platforms future development efforts were adhering to a less commercially oriented roadmap. This was the beginning of Solidus.
You can read more context here from Nebulab, an agency based in Italy who has been using Spree/Solidus since its inception and is currently the main sponsor of the Solidus open source project.
My Solidus 2020 Presentation
I flew to New York in 2014 to scope out Spree and saw a lot of energy behind the platform and our team decided to take the plunge in replatforming. It wasn't an easy transition for many reasons. However, we're in full swing with Solidus now and it has been a reliable platform that's enabled us to lean into the disruptive transformation that continues to force change within the book industry. This is the essence of my presentation that overviews our journey on Solidus while juxtaposing the disruption for a book publisher in Salt Lake City.
As always, feel free to reach out if you have any thoughts or questions.
Update 2020-10-16: Video Now Available on YouTube
The Solidus Team now has the video uploaded to YouTube. Many thanks to @Seanphden for doing such a great job in organizing the event.
