🎉 Catalyst v1.0 is Coming 🚀 #1861
Replies: 6 comments 2 replies
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We've moved deployments from the One-Click Catalyst app in the control panel over to using this new 1.0 Canary build with PPR, and much more complete Makeswift functionality - give it a try! |
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Dear Catalyst team, I have been interested in using Catalyst for a while now. I had originally discovered the project as I was exploring the vendor alternatives listed in the Next.js Commerce repo. With many things in the Next.js ecosystem going through a transitioning phase last couple years, Vercel team had announced that going forward they would only be supporting a single vendor integration. Thank you for starting the efforts to provide a second alternative for the refreshed Next.js Commerce v2.0. As the integration is now also listed in the Vercel docs, I assumed the implementation might be complete. I was also happy to see the announcement about the approaching v1.0 release, so I wanted to give Catalyst another try. I'm still struggling to have a clean start with a fresh sandboxed store. I plan to push forward with this effort after the v1.0 release so I wanted to provide a thorough feedback of the issues I've faced trying to get started up, and my concerns in general about using Catalyst. I'll break them down below to provide detail, but to summarize the main caveats for the people who don't have the time to read it all, some of the issues I noted were;
I am excited to try out v1.0 once it's released, and most of it all I am looking forward to updated documentation to be able to fully tap into Catalyst's potential. I understand the contributors are probably working on many other challenging issues approaching the release, and many or all of these issue might need to remain unaddressed. I still wanted to bring them to your attention, because comments from the team regarding any of them could help us figure out whether to tackle those issues ourselves, or expect upcoming changes to at least impact them partially. Also interested to hear more from other developers here about their experience, it would be nicer to reflect on a bit more opinions compared to the number of emoji reaction in most threads. Thank you all for your contributions to Catalyst. Looking forward to enjoying the new release and announcements from the team. Feedback breakdown1) Unaddressed community feedback Many of us are interested in a similar clarification, there are multiple long existing issues requesting a public roadmap, from as early as March of last year. (6 months old) Public roadmap for feature support? #650 The provided answer refers to this pinned post, which is announced to be continually updated Yet it's dated even few months prior to the other discussion, with no following updates, and again the same question below from another developer @Amthieu.
There is 5 upvotes to this comment. It shares the same appreciation and concern I have towards Catalyst. I agree it's really great and I'm excited for upcoming features too. On the other hand similar to the developers above, I am more curious about the specifics, whether there will be a public roadmap to help us shape expectations and scope work. Such a fundamental and shared question asked in multiple treads hanging in the air +8 months is quite concerning. As of now there aren't so many comments in each other issue tread either, yet no response to almost the most significant comments from the limited early engagement by the developers.. Since then there has also been other announcements (1, 2) by the team in the repo, so I can't figure why this is the case. It's fair if the contributors had been occupied with implementation tasks, and if a similar situation continues to the future. This is a challenging task, and we appreciate your effort. Why I bring this is up is because there is a similar situation going on regarding the vercel/commerce repo and the shopify integration. Although the vercel/commerce repo has 550 total issues, compared to the fairly recent Catalyst repo with 34 issues, there as well are developers asking similar question regarding the project's future. Some state the shopify integration documentation needs complete update (it indeed does) and others had already asked a whole year ago whether the project is no longer maintained. (2 weeks ago) 📝 Shopify Integration Documentation Needs Complete Update - Most Instructions Outdated #1425 (1 year ago) No longer maintained? #1282 Lack of continuous activity or lengthy gaps of communication paves way for such concerns regarding the future of the repo as we try to adopt Catalyst as a solution. I know this project is not abandoned, but we cannot make clear assumptions about what improvements to expect or when to expect them either. I sincerely believe this situation poses an opportunity for Catalyst, where the Shopify integration for a Next.js storefront has stagnated to the point that the project feels abandoned by some developers. All the more reason to encourage significant activity, communication and shared examples in this repo. Although we have faith in the feature set, going forward after v1.0, to what extent will the Catalyst team be supported by BigCommerce and technology partners to manage this load? Will they also have some time to allocate for community engagement, troubleshooting etc? If maintaining a public roadmap is not preferred, it would be nice to hear from the team in events like Next.js conf, or similar upcoming conferences regarding the state of the project and their reflections on its future. 2) Auto-internationalization upon provisioning I created a Sandbox store while logged in from a Spanish IP address. Without a prompt for language selection, the store was automatically set to Spanish upon initialization. I wanted to create an English store, yet the issue isn't my intention. Changing the language setting back doesn't reverse most of the text that has been just drafted in Spanish. To name just a few;
Many of these localized labels are scattered around the BigCommerce settings and requires a bit of a hunt to revert them to your preferred language. I wonder what would be the preferred precaution to avoid this situation, listing few potential ideas;
3) Failing test suite in fresh start The BIGCOMMERCE_ACCESS_TOKEN seems to have been deprecated, and as it was utilized in some APIs before, it's still commonly referenced in test specs. from a different BigCommerce repo, I encountered the description below about the variable
BIGCOMMERCE_ACCESS_TOKEN no longer seems to be required to make requests. Still I created a Store level API token as described in this link and added to my environment variables to see if that would help greenlight some of the tests from the suite, to no avail. 4) One-click Catalyst setup is problematic Under Channel Manager for my Sandbox store once I click the one-click setup, although I am already logged in, the website redirects me back to login momentarily and right afterwards reloads the dashboard. Then I dig deeper into documentation to see how I can test the one-click setup. I realize in this link that I might need to enable multi-storefront in my store. Yet as revealed in this post there are technical requirements on how to enable this. Not a big deal, but debatably now it's a stretch to call it a one-click setup. I have a fresh account that just signed up. I find this a leaky abstraction if I still manually need to update to the latest version of multiple features/APIs that I yet don't know much about. Regardless I click confirm/update for each.
All of this, not to get a storefront seat, but to be reach the step to "request" a storefront seat. After the unnecessary yet confusing previous steps, the request button reveals the message below.
After many clicks, the promised one click setup ends up in a dead end.. More effort is necessary to put this all in writing to bring to your attention either here or through support channels. The ease of setup / ease of use is not living up to what is communicated. Previous announcements & the marketing feels a bit misleading of expectations.
After all that didn't work I had wanted to try the one click setup. I thought maybe this way I could end up with a slightly different configuration and benefit from the tests successfully passing from the start. First I'm in a redirect loop, then I learn about the necessary seats, upgrades, etc.. My main objective is: to establish the intended, freshly provisioned, ground zero of a sandboxed Catalyst store, "in it's ideal starting state as preferred & specified by the Catalyst developers". It need not be a one click start, but after due effort if we could get a clean fork from the repo with all the tests passing, that would be a trustworthy reference to start working on edits to the cloned repo. Regardless of what feature set v1.0 will support, I have faith in Catalyst's capabilities, and for the parts that I will have to customize, I am willing to put in the extra work. I only want to refer to a clear statement from the team about the project's future and see them respond to feedback before being able to make this decision. What's in scope for 1.0 and will there be a public roadmap? Is BigCommerce committed to support the team to meet a certain timeline? I sincerely believe the makeswift integration will help a lot of users achieve increased productivity. Yet for others devs who mainly prefer Catalyst to manage their storefront using Next,js, is this mainly going to be a self service technology? Various documentation segments from different dates reference multiple different versions. I fear my reverse engineering now to create workarounds will face breaking changes with the 1.0 release. Deprecated variables like BIGCOMMERCE_ACCESS_TOKEN are removed from environment variables but remain implemented elsewhere. What level of community engagement / in depth documentation should we expect after the release of 1.0? 5) Guides & headless integration sample apps are outdated The examples displayed in the link below don't include a complete or incomplete example using catalyst, just a link to the catalyst repo. There are also simultaneous changes to the control panel with some of the navigation being renamed. I had activated the new navigation in order not to get used to two different UIs as a new user. Inevitably I toggled it back off while struggling to correctly follow up with existing instructions, while feeling unsure if it's possible to do, Adding to the confusion of newcomers to the platform, this could create further inconsistencies with the outdated documentation articles. All the more reason to provide an updated example on how to use Catalyst. Existing documentation is fragmented and inconsistent, with no up to date clear path for a clean Catalyst application setup. Establishing a single source of truth for the usage instructions of the new version could eliminate a significant portion of the confusion. If it's not possible to update the documentation, a video tutorial explaining / demonstrating a 0-to-production setup, or an updated sample app with working tests that we could reverse engineer would be incredibly helpful. To wrap things up, more than anything, thank you if you've read so far. I've tried to reword several parts of my feedback not to sound bitter. Some of the negative tone is rooted in my own frustration while attempting to achieve a clean configuration. The reason I wanted to share my feedback in such detail is because, despite the complexity I'm still committed to move forward using Catalyst. I hope to learn more about the timeline from the team's perspective, and their expected feature coverage for 2025 as I plan to adapt my efforts accordingly. I wish you the best with your upcoming release, and thank every contributor as well as the supporting partners for their hard work. |
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@UXmedic Thank you for taking the time to provide such detailed feedback and for your commitment to Catalyst. We deeply appreciate your effort to document your experience and highlight areas for improvement. Your insights will help us refine the project and better serve the community, and indeed I'm making sure the folks who own the relevant pieces of the pie throughout our organization get their eyes on this 👍 I'll respond to a couple of the areas of the feedback I can respond to now, and I might re-visit this later for other areas that I don't have a complete answer or next step to just yet.
This is valid feedback, it's never a good look when such questions on GitHub don't have answers. I'm inspired by the level of interest in Catalyst and the desire to see more in terms of a public roadmap - when prompted with this question previously, my first concern is that if we're going to provide a public roadmap, we have the right support in terms of an internal owner of that roadmap and ensuring it's kept up to date as things change, because I believe an out-of-date roadmap is worse than no roadmap at all. BigCommerce already has a number of forums where we talk about our future plans and upcoming roadmap such as Town Hall, so there's also a question as to whether these existing activities are sufficient or if we also should have a representation of the Catalyst-specific roadmap in GitHub or another developer-focused space. In the past, we were unable to figure out the right staffing for keeping such a roadmap up to date, and then we got busy with other things and did nothing. I'll take responsibility for that - I should have, at a minimum, communicated on those threads that this was a "not right now" and where customers could go to get that information. Inspired by your feedback, I'd like to consider this again for 2025, because it's the sort of developer experience & community I'd like to be a part of, and our DevRel team is growing so we might be able to do a good job of it and be appropriately responsive. Hope to have some good news for you soon. As a stopgap, here are our current priorities for the Catalyst program as of January:
Several of these things are, in practice, being worked on in parallel across different teams, not just the people you see active on this repo.
Thanks for letting us know about this, certainly it's easy for those of us working on this product in the US to miss the "full picture" of the international onboarding experience, and I can see how this is frustrating. This is a broader topic than just Catalyst, since it touches the onboarding for most parts of our product, but I've shared it around our org so we can figure out a plan to do better. On the topic of functional tests, we had a good discussion on the team about how to make our existing functional tests both 1) more relevant to being used by customers and 2) more responsive to testing the data that is on a store instead of any hardcoded sample data representation. I would love if our functional suite, for example, made a GQL call to request a few featured products to understand what data is on the store, and in what locale etc, before testing the rendering of that data - that would provide tests which are more portable to any customer's environment and more focused on testing Catalyst as a rendering layer on top of an API instead of testing the API itself (which we should also do, but we can keep those tests namespaced separately or internal if they are not relevant to customers). Similarly, I think we should do a better job of segmenting a test suite that is "mutative" such as injecting orders into a store, vs just testing rendering without mutating data. Those test suites could in turn benefit from their own set of docs to clarify their dependencies such as access tokens. Thanks for calling out areas where our docs are out of date especially around access tokens, we'll do a pass to correct that. |
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We're working on fixing that onboarding checklist right now - it's a list of things that are important notices for some of our existing customers who are on older versions of our features, but it shouldn't be bothering you as a new customer, so we're working on a new flow now to fix that. The dead end is misleading also - you end up on this "call us" message but if you reload channel manager you can create a storefront after all that, not that you have any way of knowing that 🤦 Thanks for sharing your experience which helped us prioritize this.
This is our future storefront, and we're treating it as such. So in terms of support - this is our big bet for the future and I do not expect Catalyst to be abandoned, just to be really upfront about that. Our initial release in February of 2024 was focused on the developer audience, so we felt ready to release once we had exceeded the capabilities of our previous "headless starters" and other reference examples out there in our ecosystem. Our 1.0 release is about serving both composable storefront devs + business users equally, with the addition of the visual editing capabilities via our Makeswift acquisition (tempered by a commitment to maintain a "clean" developer foundation without Makeswfit, so you can BYO CMS or editor). From there, we'll move in the direction of making it easier to move from our existing Stencil storefront platform for customers who wish to upgrade to Catalyst (which will include a lot of new developer tools for everyone), and then from there we might try to bring Catalyst further downmarket with improved no-code capabilities and see how far we push Makeswift's editing capabilities in that direction. So in summary, we think about our long-term roadmap in terms of "who" Catalyst is a good fit for, with this conversation happening on the threshold of our expansion from developer to developer + marketer.
Getting to the RC is allowing us to get our heads above water and focus on polish which includes improving docs + being more responsive to the community, which I hope you'll see backed up by our actions going forward. As we get to a place where the main "vision" for Catalyst has taken form, we should naturally transition to a roadmap that's largely prioritized by engagement with the community, and I think that starts now. |
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@bookernath, A big thank you for such a thorough and quick response, and also sharing your perspective. Now that we have this ongoing discussion about the approaching v1.0, I want to share with you the updates to the issues I've been having, and then I suppose it's better I leave the team to their work and patiently wait for the release. As a developer and on an individual level I share the sentiment that an out-of-date roadmap stings more than no roadmap at all. Maybe the lack of it speaks that things are in early stages and invites direct communication. On the other hand as a potential user and on a community level, I prefer a modest roadmap at best like the one you've just shared rather than tackling the ambiguity myself. I try and can only reach a half accurate evaluation whether this system is capable of providing the specs our projects need as of yet. For example, the statement below from your feedback regarding the 1.0 release resonates with me the most, making it obvious to me you understand where I am coming from. I really appreciate this note you added 🙏 I believe the repo might already be capable of providing almost everything I need. It has a developer foundation, probably a strong and capable one too, just not totally clean. All developers would appreciate "clean" but that is above my standards here. I am willing to settle for less, my more vital requirement is "well documented minimum functionality". I communicate in such detail now because
I came to learn about BigCommerce recently, then Stencil, then Catalyst. First reading the Vercel website integration article, Partner Portal, Github repo etc.. After being exposed to multiple resources with slightly differing versions of instructions, honestly the learning curve for what could've been a very fast process becomes quite confusing. There are some points making it difficult to implement small changes and incrementally mold the starting template to our needs.
After you providing the link I watched the Q4 meeting in the link below Unless BigCommerce wants to carry the conversation to their own platform only for logged in partners, I believe these kind of updates / videos could also be shared here or in a public youtube channel. Github is the main medium to discuss with developers. As of now the next town hall is TBA, and having two simultaneous channels without cross access to the same material in my opinion serves to split the discussion for no practical purpose. In the video minutes 31" to 34" there is a three minute demo of Catalyst, though only regarding the makeswift integration. Since this is a big project of interest for the Next.js community, a similar explanatory presentation in their annual conference could reach out to many of us developers who are interested in a proper use demo by someone from the team. I yearn for an end-to-end resource guiding us from registration to a functional store for production, step-by-step for each integration including tests. Clean path to initialization (issues I encountered) 1) Stencil vs Catalyst storefront For example, the first installation instruction on catalyst.dev is "Run the Catalyst CLI", this step prompts input like if we want sample data to be populated. Suddenly we need to make decisions we do not know much about, all we want is to keep in sync with the intended system state while following instructions. Highlighting selection details like these assures newcomers like me that we're on the right track. When we make a selection we weren't informed about, regardless the choice, it feels like trailing off course because we wonder what was on the other side of that decision fork. Some are more confusing then should I populate mock data or not. As the "Prerequisites" instructions suggest when we create a Sandbox store from the Partner portal, since we cannot select the type of storefront, it's initiated as a stencil channel. Then if we use the init function below as referenced in "Manual" installation and also the Vercel integration article pnpm create @bigcommerce/catalyst@latest init It allows us to pick from a list of channels (So far since we only created the Sandboxed env from PartnerPortal there's only the Stencil channel) However if we were to use the "create" command as highlighted in the CLI setup pnpm create @bigcommerce/catalyst@latest This creates a Catalyst storefront, recognizable from the botanic theme rather than the white/beige Stencil default theme with "task lamp" & "book for cooks" carousel. The init command allows to connect to a Stencil storefront, is Catalyst compatible with both? Does it not matter which type of channel we connect to using the CLI? 2) Problems regarding the Partner Portal I already informed the BigCommerce support about the most significant issues if you would like to track the progression of the related cases I share them below. Case # 08372653 Here I would like to detail my steps because it might also serve as a workaround to others in my situation. I will also share updates on our findings trying to troubleshoot the auto-internationalization upon init. Since it's quite challenging so far to setup test & deploy everything within 15 days in its current state, the agency Partner Program is the main point of entry for devs who want to learn more about Catalyst. Sadly there are problems from ground 0. In the process I had to create two different accounts using work emails. Identical information besides email addresses. Both had permission problems after account creation. When I wanted to create a sandbox environment, I get the error
My first account stopped receiving this error 15-20 minutes after creation by itself, and I proceeded to create my store. The other account 5+ days still isn't authorized for any activity, from registering a deal to creating a sandbox store, it errors on every attempt. The support team are incredibly nice, kind, attentive & fast to communicate. However this is only the layer of the support team which listens to us and collects our feedback, in terms of a solution so far there hasn't been any account changes implemented by the admins or technical updates. The first step to onboarding can be you signup to the Partner Portal, figure out you're not authorized to provision anything & contact admins the first thing you do. This is far from ideal for a self service technology. For one of the accounts the issue resolved itself, the other still remains unauthorized despite having heard back from the support. As explained in my previous writing to this tread, in my first store initialization, the platform picked up on my location and although it's not the preferred language in my browser settings, initialized my store in Spanish without prompting me a choice. Also if you have a wrong attempt, you have no way of deleting your draft store, adding to the inevitable clutter. Onboarding users do not have prior knowledge of the platform. They simultaneously get exposed to BigCommerce's schema and Catalyst's effort of integrating with it. Some support from the BigCommerce Partner Portal side on providing choices for initialization would help a lot. We could pick our preferred storefront as Catalyst instead of Stencil and configure details such as desired locales. Support team suggested maybe the account settings were set to Spain upon registration of my BigCommerce account and provisioned resources with similar settings. After our discussions with the them elevated the issue to the product team, I set on to try workarounds by mimicking my connection to be elsewhere. I cannot be 100% sure what is the crucial point because I still had failed attempts amidst the 10-15 stores I created using VPNs, but this method works. I first set my VPN connection to UK and registered a new account. (The second account mentioned above, which never got activated) And as I ran out of work emails, while waiting for the authorization on the new account, I tried the old account with a UK vpn connection and it created an English store. A mini victory for debugging, as it rules out the effect being rooted to account creation, and more to do where you are actively connecting from. I wonder if browser settings / preferred languages factor into it. I was hoping the English provisioning of mock data would help the E2E tests, but later realized there's more work to be done to adapt the existing tests. This achievement to initialize the store in English, also set the currency to GBP. I suppose this is something I can fix and convert to euro's later, however I believe it's related to the error message I received from the searchbox, which I'll explain in the upcoming points. 3) E2E tests This is one of the main reasons I want to use Catalyst. There is a beautiful suite of end-to-end functionality tests, ui tests and visual regression sadeguards setup by talented individuals and I want to benefit from it. However because the codebase have moved on, the implementation details changed with respect to the existing tests. For example, the breadcrumbs UI test could easily be greenlit if one manually adds the Knives subcategory under the kitchen section of their store. The UI tests require marginal tweaks and adaptations, I suppose the e2e feature specs also need an updated configuration for API usage. The author(s) of this suite would be much better positioned to recover these tests to reflect the functional state of the repo. It would be nice if they could be satisfied with the standard set of mock data created upon provisioning the resource from BigCommerce Partner Portal. Functional tests also serve to describe us the system's capabilities in the absence of documentation. Even before v1.0, in order to fulfil business requirements the current feature set is already up to my needs. Before B2B components, gift certificates & analytics, I just need this health check of core functionality established so I can start introducing incremental changes, and get notified when something breaks. Then CI can inform me if I've regressed on something etc. I can customise components myself or implement other well documented analytics tools if need be, but cannot address the core of Catalyst without a solid foundation of guiding resources from the team. I sincerely hope we get a prerelease update of the repo in it's current viable functionality with functional tests and a clean polish, so we can start building our store from there, before having to wait for other features in plan for v1.0 to wrap up. 4) Search error const searchBox = page.getByPlaceholder('Search...'); seems if we just reword that string to "Search Products" which is the placeholder used in the implementation, thing should work. BigCommerce API returned 400 { "message": "Variable '$currencyCode' is not defined by operation 'getQuickSearchResults'.", "locations": [ { "line": 49, "column": 24 }, { "line": 1, "column": 1 } ] } I cannot pinpoint this one down, however seems yet another issue about i18n, something going wrong in the auto-initialized localization settings. I personally would've much preferred one default but guaranteed to be working configuration which I can adapt myself so I would at least know where it would be incomplete / expected to fail.
I understand and respect most devs could be in the US or english speaking, still, such internationalisation issues casts a shadow over what's offered here as international ecommerce is inherently cross border & multilingual. I am attaching a screenshot of the error. I assume it wouldn't be visible in a production environment, yet I can't guess what the user would be experiencing instead, an unresponsive search bar?
I can't establish a fair estimate of how deep these issues go, or whether I would be able to battle them myself if fixing bugs isn't prioritized over feature parity with Stencil. I understand and respect after an acquisition if the team feels like the direction to go is promoting makeswift usage and broaden its reach as much as possible. However it seems to achieve this goal faster, some of the changes introduced are either undocumented or not reflected equally across every part of the codebase. I am looking forward to trying the release or the candidate! We'd greatly appreciate some guidance on the proper way of getting started until then. |
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For your currency issue, you probably need to pull in this commit: We noticed this bug in rc.4 and fixed it in rc.5; it was missed when multi-currency support was added. Here's a quick end-to-end setup video just to clarify the intended way of getting started with One-Click Catalyst and getting a "clean" starting point; it seems like the flow starting from vercel.com was rather confusing and had you landing in the partner portal which is not necessary for Catalyst setup, but the feedback is making it to the appropriate teams so we can review the flow starting from vercel.com and improve it, as well as that partner portal experience overall. Starting from within the BC store, it's intended to be pretty straightforward: One-Click.Catalyst.Setup.Demo.mp4(I did fast-forward a few of the loading screens for brevity) |
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Functional tests will be re-established before we come out of RC and call 1.0 stable. |
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Hi @bookernath, Thank you so much for taking the time to prepare this video. Both really helpful and also a stress relieving reference to be able to double check our own steps, compare, and sort out the differences. As your suggestion I will check out the release candidates. I see rc7 is shared few days ago, I will try the same setup with it and let you know if I encounter the issue again. Could you please help me clarify some things about navigating the setup like you've shared. So far, my understanding of the existing access points for the BigCommerce platform are;
If you were to check my accounts, you would see many stores similarly named to yours. From the learning attempts I had, I repeatedly created stores like "catalyst demo", "catalyst test", "uk store", "spain store" etc. I wasn't very mindful while cluttering my account's namespace, I had even registered a second account while trying to troubleshoot to auto-internationalization issue.
Both my accounts are littered with such confusingly similar naming patterns. I submitted my removal requests using my support pin and the support team has been extremely attentive and helpful, explaining things to in quite a detailed manner. Although having to contact support for removing such learning attempts is still less then ideal, I can't express how thorough the support team has been, incredible in many regards. From what I understand the marked-for-removal stores will decay out of existence after 3-6 months.. Even if the same project name isn't freed on the namespace until the actual removal takes place, somehow making this more user friendly, and hiding the deleted project from the user at least in the UI could help newcomers like me to avoid confusion and maintain a clean account.
This is understandable, as tests would also be re-established with v1.0 I am happy to give things a fresh try after the release. Like the instructions in the video you've shared, I am trying to understand the "intended approach" with the account setup too. Here is where my confusion stems,
Btw big thanks to the catalyst team for posting a detailed breakdown of the milestones. I suppose the team intentionally avoids mentioning even a tentative release date for v1.0. However the mentioned target timeframes Q1-Q2, 2005 or TBA, span an unpredictably vague period. From the discussion boards and the announcements it seems v1.0 is around the corner, yet 2005 could be couple weeks down the road or 10 months ahead. Since I am not clear if v1.0 includes all or only a subset of these milestones, I want to ask your opinions. In term of the ideal configuration for account setup, it seems the developer portal is unrelated to our cause and mainly suited for those who develop apps or integrations for BigCommerce, not for developers who seek to use Catalyst to implement stores. The partner portal is for deal registration and sandbox testing stores, however they cannot be used for preparation because it's not later possible to convert them to live stores. Which leaves us only with the 15 day trial on the regular platform. BigCommerce says it offers a "fully functional" 15 day free trial. I by no means need full functionality, I only wouldn't want to incur billing for the unknown period where I am establishing my store, not operating it. I don't intend or expect to make a sale in the period. I am only inquiring on this for setup purposes. In the current state of things it's even catching up with documentation and discussion treads, waiting for release candidates etc take longer than 15 days. The two emails I own and reliably check are already used and cluttered in this process. What is the intended way of implementing a catalyst store for newcomers like me? Are we ought to follow the signup like the video you've shared, convert to paid customers in 15 days, and then wait for catalyst to be released for weeks/months while we pay to wait? I've been following the repo for quite a long time, even after the release I will try to re-adapt the "re-established" tests to my specs.. The details of the release, and whether what we end up with will satisfy our needs, are all hypothetical until we get to give v1.0 a try. Not knowing how to approach this creates an unwanted motivation, a deterrent factor to avoid using up the 15 trial early and defer experimenting with Catalyst till after it's ready. Wouldn't you agree us "store developers" deserve a similar mode, like the integration developers portal or the partners portal, a restricted, not-fully but functional environment for review purposes. We could then develop our storefronts without this arbitrary time restriction, which in turn is very affected by the complexity of BigCommerce's product. Once a functional and approved storefront is achieved, like me, many people would be happy to convert to paid customers and only after that start operations. Not only is this a simple and reasonable expectation, it's also a possibility BigCommerce's lead competitor Shopify provides. Partner portal provides an alternative to organize such preparation work. To me it was a bit surprising that I wouldn't be able to convert a sandbox store for production use later. Sadly we have to repeat the same configuration manually. And in the FAQ it states the store data will cease to persist after the trial ends. I am not seeking to ask for an extended trial, I am more wondering if there is something in the works to help ease this developer experience in the future by allowing us to build without time restrictions and convert to our trial or paid services once we are ready for production. |
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We're thrilled to announce Catalyst v1.0, a major milestone in our journey to redefine modern ecommerce storefronts. This release marks the transition of Catalyst from a blank slate to a beautifully designed, fully-featured starting point, leveraging the cutting-edge VIBES design system and the sleek Soul VIBE.
With this update, Catalyst is poised to deliver unparalleled flexibility, performance, and ease of use for a greater number of our customers.
This completes the improvements we forecast in our last update.
🌟 What's New
🛠️ Improved Themeability & Code Structure
A clean abstraction between data fetching and UI components makes it easier to tailor the look and feel while still pulling in updates to business logic & new features from upstream.
🎨 VIBES Compatibility & "Soul" VIBE
This update lays the foundation for integration with future VIBES, allowing users who adopt Catalyst to pick from pre-built design systems similar to themes. Abstracting the UI components from the data and business logic with standardized prop APIs will make it straightforward to swap UI components in the future.
The VIBE we've integrated in this release is called Soul, and it was built collaboratively between the Monogram, Makeswift, and BigCommerce teams. Think of this as the new reference design for Catalyst, as Cornerstone was for Stencil - a feature complete reference VIBE that also serves as the standard for new VIBE creation for our agency and theme partners.
We're polishing our VIBES standards with this release and we'd like feedback on what you'd like to see from the VIBES ecosystem next.
🌀 Enhanced Theming with Tailwind and CSS Variables
Smarter use of modern Tailwind CSS allows for powerful theming by simply tweaking CSS variables, making design adjustments faster and more intuitive.
⚡ Cutting-Edge Rendering with PPR
We've refactored data fetching to make maximum use of Partial Prerendering (PPR) in Next.js v15:
🖼️ Deep Makeswift Integration
Built-in support for Makeswift as a visual editor (on the Makeswift-enabled version of Catalyst), enables drag-and-drop site building for non-developers. And for those who prefer code, Catalyst's default core code remains agnostic, so you can use any tools you like.
🔄 Changes to Branches and Tags
As part of this release, we're making important changes to how Catalyst is versioned and distributed:
Default Branch Change
canaryinstead ofmaincanarywill be where the latest in-development code is mergedCLI Default Deployment
@bigcommerce/catalyst-core@latesttag by defaultcanaryis not guaranteed to be stable, hence the branch namingFor Makeswift Users
If you plan to use Makeswift, use the
@bigcommerce/catalyst-core@makeswift-latesttag to get the latest compatible version. This version is also what the BigCommerce Control Panel deploys by default.Versioning Strategy Update
🎁 Get an Early Preview
Want to get your hands on Catalyst v1.0 before the official release? Pull down the canary version of v1.0 at
@bigcommerce/catalyst-core@canaryor start a new project with the CLI:View the demo site here.
🙏 Thank You, Community
Your feedback has been the driving force behind this overhaul. We're incredibly grateful for your insights and can't wait to see what you build with Catalyst v1.0.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments! What excites you most about this update? What features are you looking forward to using? What can we improve next?
Happy building! 🛍️✨
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