One of the main technologies we build on top of in Locastic is Sylius, a PHP and Symfony-based e-commerce solution which provides a high degree of potential customizability and great developer experience for our BE developers.
On the side of functionality, we can implement almost any imaginable business requirements which our clients might need in their e-commerce businesses. Still, there has always been one issue with Sylius which we kept bumping into.
In this post, I am going to talk about our initiative to address that issue.
The problems with the Sylius AdminBundle
The main issue with the Sylius AdminBundle is that it is built with a UI library which is not being maintained anymore.
That fact puts a bottleneck on the ability of the adminBundle to improve inside the core, in efforts of developers doing customizations for their own implementations and developers creating plugins that build on top of it.
There are other major issues as well, responsivity to screen sizes is one of them, the Sylius admin is almost completely unusable on the phone, and semi-usable on the tablet, which limits the end user’s ability to interact with the admin in ways it makes sense for their business.
The Sylius core team has also stated that they are aware of these issues and planning to provide a revised theme in their 2.0 version planned for Q3 of 2023.
Sylify to the rescue
For a while now, we’ve been building our own answer to this problem. We created a new and improved admin bundle restyled with Bootstrap instead of SemanticUI and improved the user experience and accessibility along the way – we also made it responsive.
We know that the Sylius team is great in what they do with Sylius and we would like to help them to focus on what they do best, by helping to kickstart the reworking of the admin bundle for the next version by the community.
In the best case Sylify aims to become the next default admin theme, but in the meanwhile its going to be released as a plugin that automatically provides fallbacks and handles backward compatibility with the plugins that you are using and with the customizations you have already built in.
If you would like to know more about the project, you can check out the talk we did about it on the first-ever Sylius Con a short while ago, or go check out the Sylify project landing page at https://sylify.com/
Current stage
At the moment, we are trying to apply the theme to a couple of projects we are running and figure out the bugs and glitches along the way, once we are done with that, we will open up the project for contributions so we can get the community involved.
At the moment, we did receive a couple of offers of people of who people who wanted to contribute, for which we are grateful, but at this stage, we still want to prepare the groundwork ourselves.
