Boost Day 2023 by Shopware

Intense and fruitful discussions, loads of experiences shared and numerous current challenges for E‑commerce overcome. However, above all, an awesome opportunity to explore some brand new functionalities that Shopware 6.5. offers. In a nutshell, that was the Shopware event that transpired on January 20 and hosted, i.a., the salestube powered by hmmh crew. Read below for a short wrap-up of this amazing event.

Such meetings boast a unique and priceless asset. They let us bounce our ideas and experiences off other e‑commerce fellas; what a precious opportunity, considering the pace at which this industry has been evolving competence and technology-wise, not too mention the rapidly growing expectations of our clients.

Boost Day 2023 by Shopware happened online on gather.town. It was held to share and collect feedback from the Shopware partners (our crew included!). Our task was to figure out solutions to the tasks that directly or indirectly concerned the Shopware platform. The tasks were first to be found on Stackoverflow.

We could consult any issues with the other participants of the event at all times, which was also one of the goals of the entire project. Our team gave a total of 10 answers, asked questions, and actively participated in many discussions by chipping in with some relevant comments.

The biggest challenges we faced

As early as at the Stackoverflow search, we encountered some ”obstacles”. Not so much of technical nature, bur rather related with the structure of the tasks and communication.

First of all, the questions were too general/a bit vague/too imprecise. When challenged by the task of ”It doesn’t work/There’s a problem on my end”, we found it hard to handle, especially with the limited view/awareness of the environment. Despite that, we actually did have ideas how to address it.

A lot of the questions were posed in such a way that it made them really difficult to solve. So we often wound up spending more time to discover what the bottom line was, rather than focusing on the tasks at hand.

#Teamspirit

Team work, again, proved to be key to successfully dealing with the challenges we faced at the event.

While answering a given question we needed another person to run the so-called ‘sanity check’, something we do daily when debugging issues. Also, one more person had to be involved to make sure we understood the questions. It surely was a great test of how we communicate as a team. Oh, and by the way, it was flawless at the event

To wrap things up/to sum up/all in all, I’d compare Boost Day 2023 by Shopware to a more demanding version of the daily consultation that we carry out as developers. Why more demanding? Because on most occasions we obviously couldn’t get the authors of the questions to clarify them and the language barrier they struggled with made the whole thing even more complex.

What’s new in Shopware 6.5

The key changes in the new version of Shopware are the transition from the minimum version of PHP from 7 to 8 (i.e. from 7.4 to 8.1) and the change of Symfony from 5 to 6. Some equally important changes concern features, for example greater opportunities to optimize the API and facilitate the update process.

A couple of new functions were also presented. They actually will be already up and running in version 6.4, but were presented as the novelties of version 6.5. These are: Multiwarehouse – move from Elasticsearch to Opensearch and the ability to copy and paste flow configurations from Flow Builder between stores.

What else is new in Shopware 6.5?

This new version brings to the table many new features in the products module. They certainly will  make it easier for vendors to use and manage them. Now you also easily can add attributes to products, assign them to categories, and indicate products that are related.

Shopware 6.5 also features many improvements to the payment modules, including integration with new payment methods. This allows online stores to offer their customers a wider choice of payment options, including Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal.

Further improvements have also been made to the shipping module, which now allows vendors to better handle their costs and delivery methods. It is also a great deal easier now to set different shipping rates for different regions, as well as select your preferred courier companies.