There was a Shopware Community Day this year again! I already was part of the Community Day last year, but this year Shopware had a different approach.

There was a day for developers and one for merchants. Let's take a look at the dev day!

Shopware Community Dev Day - 2023

This year the event took place at the Landschaftspark Duisburg. There was a small building with a couple of rooms but limited space.

About 100 people were invited to attend this day. I was one of the lucky participants and would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank Shopware and the responsible people 💙.

The Program

It felt a bit like an UnConference but with a single track. The day started with some Shopware history. The Founder & CEO of Shopware Stefan Hamann gave us an entertaining look into the past of Shopware.

The End of Shopware 5

Next, Michael "Telgi" Telgmann talked about the journey of Shopware 5 and the end of life of Shopware 5. There are still a lot of shops running on Shopware 5 so how will this be organized? And what will happen after it? - That's what was covered in this emotional talk.

For everyone using Shopware 5, there will still be bug fixes and improvements until the end of July 2023. You also get security updates until the end of July 2024.

Do you still want to use Shopware 5 for the next couple of years? Take a look at safefive!

Shopware Composables Frontend

Another talk I was excited about was from Ramona Schwering. She talked about Composable Frontends. It's possible to fully customize your Shopware Frontend with that toolkit.

You can start your project completely from scratch or you can use some demo store templates which are based Vue.js and Nuxt3.

Do you want to create a very unique shop? Then you should take a look at it!

Shopware Community Engagement Program

This event was about the community - So they just introduced the new Shopware Community Engagement Program. Shopware wants to support the community members and their work with that program.

Unfortunately, there was not much information about it. It turns out the program is not ready yet. It will come so keep your eyes open!

Scaling 1000+ Shops in the Cloud

Shopware also has a SaaS solution as well. All the Shops running in the cloud get automatic software updates.

Now when updating over 1000 shops at the same time you probably face some performance issues. This talk by Jens Küper was very interesting. He gave some insights on the issues Shopware face and how they fixed them.

The Feedback Portal

A new community feedback tool was introduced by Martina Linnemann. In the past, everything was in one place. You found everything in the Shopware issue tracker. The feedback portal was introduced for submitting new ideas, and features and voting on them.

So if you have an idea or want to give some feedback to Shopware, take a look at the Feedback Portal!

Admin Extension SDK - Plugins vs. Apps

Sebastian Seggewiß was APPsolutely great on stage. There was a lot of information about Shopware Apps and the Admin Extension SDK.

The approach now is, can we do it with an app? Unfortunately, you can not do everything with an app.

But other things can be done much faster with an app. There was a comparison in the talk like this Plugin vs. App - Custom Field.

Community vs. Shopware

Take a look at this Cody. The task was to create a Cody on a desk with the Shopware Logo using AI. Could not be that hard right? Well try this on your own, it's a real challenge! It was a lot of fun to see some of the results.

Christian Dangl has a very good picture that summarizes this battle in his blog post!

We rise above beyond

Speaking of Christian Dangl he had a fantastic talk at the SCD. I don't even have words for this. He literally created superheroes on that day and not only this, he let the crowd see Shakespeare in action.

This talk also provided very good insight into what a project with Shopware 6 could look like. If you read these lines go watch that talk even if you never heard about Shopware before!

Big props to Christian and don't forget to check out his blog post!

Black Stories

The last talk was not really a talk, it was a game. The rules are pretty simple you get a short story. Now you have to debug real problems and find solutions that occur in projects by only asking questions. The questions only can be answered with a "yes" or a "no". It was a lot of fun!

Conclusion

This was my second SCD and I really liked the concept of separating the event into 2 different days. The atmosphere at the dev-day was almost like an UnConference.

The only thing that was missing was to stream the event. There was very limited space so a live stream would have been great! I will

Next year I will definitely attend the SCD again if I can get a ticket. And finally, I have to thank Shopware for this great event. So thank you Shopware 💙