RR 441: Solidus with Alessandro Desantis

Dec 10, 2019

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Alessandro Desantis is the director of Nebulab and is currently working on Solidus. After talking a little bit about how Nebulab got started, he describes what Solidus is. Solidus is a free, open source eCommerce platform built in Ruby on Rails that gives you complete control over your store. Three things that set it apart from other eCommerce platforms are that it is governed by a single company and that the focus is on quality and backwards compatibility. One of their biggest goals is to make Solidus streamlined, and Alessandro talks about how they handle it with the complex business logic involved in eCommerce. He talks more about the governance of Solidus and the different teams involved. Alessandro admits that Solidus has fewer features than some of its competitors, but this makes it very powerful and customizable. It can be tacked onto any Rails engine and you can pick and choose the things you want. Solidus was made with fewer features because of the unique nature of each eCommerce store. The creators noticed that when people create their stores, they had to adapt their business to suit the eCommerce software they used because the software was not as customizable. Solidus wanted to avoid that, so they provide the foundation and people can customize it. To customize Solidus, the documentation is available on the Solidus website, but the company encourages experimentation. Alessandro regrets that people think eCommerce companies are not technology companies, and so they tend to delegate it to someone else. He and Charles talk about some of the technical aspects of Solidus and what the future holds. In the future, the company plans to emphasize communication and the presentation of Solidus as a tool to help people make the right choice for their business, as well as streamlining the onboarding experience. To contribute to Solidus, you can contribute to the core itself or any of the extensions. There is also an active Slack community where you can ask for the best place to help. The show concludes with Alessandro talking about some of the other projects he’s working on. Panelists

Charles Max Wood

Guest

Alessandro Desantis