2021.7 and beyond

[Dan (danh91)]

Hey everyone,

Happy to share that both purplship SDK 2021.7 and purplship server 2021.7 releases are out. 🥳

This release is a milestone for the project as some users have deployed the purplship server in production, and some are in staging preparing to go live.
This release is notable because it's a stepping stone toward our vision of making shipping service integration easier by commoditizing the multi-carrier shipping API.

purplship 2021.7 release highlights

• Improved parsing of carrier response with shipping services unknown to purplship
• An improved usage of dynamically detected carrier supported capabilities
• A richer and more robust shipping dashboard
• And many more bug fixes...

More details on the release notes:

• purplship server
• purplship SDK

Community building

What we can all learn from other thriving open source projects is that the success and sustainability of a project depend on a vibrant community. I have intentionally collaborated with most of you through private chats and calls. This has worked so far and brought us where we are. That said, I believe it is time to adopt some practices that can help us build this community and help each other on our shipping integration journey and its shares of challenges.

So I did like to encourage the following:

• Asking questions publicly on our Github discussions page
• Filing issues on the purplship server issue tracker
• Join our Discord channel to discuss features or talk to the maintainers in private chat for private matters

Doing that will help visitors realize that purplship is actively maintained, we will be able to help each other with issues already encountered, and as a maintainer reduce the various dispersed notifications that can be distracting during focused development hours. 😎

Commitments we are taking to help build community

• Publish more contents, thoughts, ideas, blogs about the purplship ecosystem and shipping integration in general
• Enrich the docs (btw we've made the documentation sites easier so you to can contribute)
• A publicly maintained roadmap (highlighting integrated carriers and upcoming features)

Shoutout 👯

I did like to thank Jacob Shilitz (@jacobshilitz) and his team for being the first adopters earlier when purplship was barely a rough prototype. They have proposed a lot of features, insights and provided a lot of feedback along the way.

Shoutout to Kevin Firko (@firxworx) for his enthusiasm toward the project and his great work on providing a way to deploy purplship-server on AWS. checkout https://github.com/firxworx/purplship-aws-cdk

Shoutout to ET (@blueprin4) who helped improved the Heroku purplship deployment with feedback on challenges at the onboarding level

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Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment below and make suggestions/comments on how we can create a safe and vibrant community

Don't forget to give us a 🌟 on our main repositories purplship and purplship-server

Daniel K