docs: introduce roadmap

[lassediercks]

In order to establish a foundation to discuss future endeavours we introduce documentation that reflects the current core team decisions

Summary

It is a common pattern in OOS to have a publicly available roadmap. While I won't go into the advantages of that, it is my opinion that as many components in the eCommerce domain are evolving, the question of which direction Solidus is trying to go becomes more important.

In the Solidus Slack @kennyadsl let me know what the only item on the list is the new Admin ui right now.

As I am not a maintainer (not even writing ruby) I must admit I do not really know what the new admin ui makes it a better ui than the current one. So I wanted get some feeback on :

• Is a publicly documented Roadmap in code something solidus would like to maintain?
• What is the big improvement coming with the new admin ui?

Checklist

Check out our PR guidelines for more details.

The following are mandatory for all PRs:

• I agree that my PR will be published under the same license as Solidus](https://github.com/solidusio/solidus/blob/main/LICENSE.md).
• I have written a thorough PR description.
• I have kept my commits small and atomic.
• I have used clear, explanatory commit messages.

[codecov]

Codecov Report

All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests ✅

Project coverage is 88.82%. Comparing base (12faa88) to head (1ec61a9).

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##             main    #6229      +/-   ##
==========================================
+ Coverage   86.63%   88.82%   +2.18%     
==========================================
  Files         520      849     +329     
  Lines       11933    18312    +6379     
==========================================
+ Hits        10338    16265    +5927     
- Misses       1595     2047     +452     

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[kennyadsl]

Is a publicly documented Roadmap in code something solidus would like to maintain?

IMHO these things go out of date very quickly. We need to make it clear what we are working on, though. I'm not opposed to the idea of this new ROADMAP file for now.

What is the big improvement coming with the new admin UI?

Well, first of all we are modernizing the tech stack of Solidus. The new admin will use what a Rails dev is familiar with and what is shipped with Rails (the hotwire stack). Also, we are making a lot of improvements in the admin UI and UX.

[jarednorman]

There was some discussion around what we should do regarding a roadmap at the core team meeting this morning (which I missed), but we'll share the plan around a roadmap as soon as the core team has properly discussed.

[lassediercks]

thanks for your replies.

as I said: this should create a foundation to have meaningful discussions upon. This is not a request to come up with a roadmap.

[tvdeyen]

From the core team meeting @adammathys and I discussed that this is a good start, but ideally we have something that is easier to automate than a markdown file. We also have a Roadmap project on our GitHub org, in order to assign issues and PRs. We have a milestone for the 5.0 release as well. We also discussed that we might want to use GitHub discussions and its polling feature to discuss with the wider community which features are worth working.

In general we all agree that we need to do more.

Merging now, so we can start adding to this file.

[tvdeyen]

It might be useful to link the ROADMAP file from the README for better discoverability

[tvdeyen]

EDIT: Updated the link to the public roadmap project we already have

[lassediercks]

Merging now, so we can start adding to this file.

thank you!

I've amended your suggestions

[tvdeyen]

Talked about this in the coreteam meeting yesterday and @jarednorman and me tend to prefer the already existing Roadmap projects instead of a markdown file.

[tvdeyen]

We also have GH discussions enabled where the "components in the eCommerce domain are evolving' can be discussed as well.

[benjaminwil]

Would a member of the solidusio organization be able to archive the roadmap repository if the intention is to only use the GitHub project from now on?

https://github.com/solidusio/roadmap

[benjaminwil]

I just created a new pull request that adds a link to the roadmap to the README: #6284

[tvdeyen]

Would a member of the solidusio organization be able to archive the roadmap repository if the intention is to only use the GitHub project from now on?

https://github.com/solidusio/roadmap

Wasn't aware that thing even exists. From the readme it seems that this was necessary to have the project board attached to it. Now that GitHub projects are attached to the org, we might be able to close it.

[lassediercks]

with @benjaminwil #6284 introducing a link to the github project as the official roadmap I'll say that the task this pr wanted to accomplish has been achieved in another way so this pr is no longer relevant.