Last month, the maintainers team held a special event for the open source project: a public demonstrations session. To better understand what this is about, let’s provide some context.

Demonstrations at PrestaShop

Historically, the maintainers team of the PrestaShop open source project was only composed of employees from the PrestaShop company, developers assigned by the company to work on the project. This team used many forms of organizations over years, the most recent being a mix of Scrum rituals and Kanban method. One of the Scrum rituals being followed by the team is the demo session.

Scrum’s demo is a regularly held event that takes place at the end of each development cycle (called sprint), where the team demonstrates what has been built. This helps stakeholders, inside and outside the team, to witness the outcome, what has been delivered, and provide feedback. For years, this event happened regularly, but only employees of the PrestaShop company were invited.

Since 2020, the PrestaShop project is becoming increasingly independent from the PrestaShop company. One of the major milestone of this evolution has been the introduction of community maintainers @kpodemski and @pululuk.

As the project becomes more open, transparency is key. During 2020, we published the Maintainer’s Guide. Next step: making the demo meetings public, and streamed live!

We hope that this event will become a regular rendez-vous for the maintainers and the PrestaShop community to share information, feedback, and ideas.

The first Public open source demonstrations

The first online session of what we call for now “Public PrestaShop open source demonstrations” was held last month on the 28th of January.

Since this was our very first attempt to this type of meeting, in English, and including people from outside the PrestaShop company, this first session was open for maintainers but not for community. The objective was to give the concept a shot before going fully public. We have already identified multiple areas for improvement, but we were globally satisfied with the result.

Next session, however, will be public and streamed live on the PrestaShop project’s new YouTube channel.

Attendees will be able to ask questions in the chat that will be read and answered live.

Each session will be kept in record on YouTube, so that even if you can’t attend to the live stream, you will still be able to catch up later.

This first session agenda

The first session agenda was as follows:

  • 00:00 Introduction
  • 02:23 Presentation of the agenda
  • 03:06 Event rules
  • 04:20 Project announcements
  • 06:04 First demonstration - Multishop support for Symfony BO pages by @matthieu-rolland
  • 18:40 Second demonstration - Enhanced module capacities to customize Symfony forms thanks to form simplification by @matks
  • 29:51 Questions & Answers
  • 38:30 Closure

You can use the timestamps to jump directly to the parts you want to watch.

Watch the replay on YouTube

Next step, second session on the 25th of February

The next session of “public PrestaShop open source demonstrations” is scheduled for the 25th of February at 2pm CET – that’s next Thursday! If you want to learn more about the PrestaShop project… see you there!

Join us on YouTube for the second session!