Inquiry, not issue: update version of handlebars in stencil-cli / production schedule?

[34638a]

Hi BC,

Wasn't sure if there was a email or what not I can send these kinds of questions to:

In regards to paper-handlebars updates, how often do the dependant packages like stencil-cli get updates with the latest versions of these packages. I was just wondering how often these kind of "non-critical" "feature" bumps would typically happen, would it be monthly, quarterly, annually?

Just wondering so we can plan changes to our theme around when these kinds of features would be available in production.

• Jordan
  Online Workwear Australia.

[34638a]

@jairo-bc
Sorry for the bump on this, just wasn't sure if it'll get seen without tagging anyone given how few people are likely working on paper-handlebars atm.

We just hoping for a insight into the process for internal scheduling around a big change we're planning with BC API on our side for our store.

• jordan

[jairo-bc]

@34638a No worries, feel free to tag me.

We don't have any particular schedule. We work in agile manner. As soon as it rollouts fully to production services, it's good to be updated in stencil cli.

[34638a]

I guess a fair question in that case is, any guesstimates as to when the next release cycle will be, I imagine it would be bi-annually for a major push if there is one?

• Jordan

[34638a]

@jairo-bc ,

Actually, should I be asking this over in stencil cli repo? Given that this is one of those "upstream" problems. If not where would you consider to be the most appropriate place to start a line of inquiry?

As is pretty clear, I'm more than happy to open a pr where required and run any and all tests needed to get a feature we want over the line 😀.

• Jordan

[jairo-bc]

@34638a Depends pretty much on priorities and how big is the update. Are you referring to some specific update?

[34638a]

@jairo-bc More in general than anything else, but the jsonparsesafe inline helper patch and assignVar patches have got my coworker from marketing drooling a little I wont deny ( yes I am aware of the bias because I submitted them ). I honestly figure that the assignVar patch alone will make a huge overall difference to theme development as a whole just due to how it will change what you can do with variables in themes and widgets. So if I had to choose, those two are the ones we would want sooner than later.

I guess a fair question in that case is, any guesstimates as to when the next release cycle will be, I imagine it would be bi-annually for a major push if there is one?

• Jordan

Just so my thoughts are transparent:
BC Catalyst looks like it gets a update every couple of weeks to the core system, and there's a new API that it can tap into at least once a quarter for the last year or so.
All these PR's that have been merged into main branch of paper-handlebars have to be usable at some point in production 🤷‍♂️.

Admittedly my reasoning is a bit selfish. More or less we're looking towards a major overhaul of our entire store from theme to data and post purchase systems; and if we get a vague idea when it's likely that the BC stencil engine as a whole will get a bump in version that includes these PR's, it will just help us overall with how we go about designing our theme from a logic perspective. Our goal is that our customers should be having a experience on our website as close to HTML and CSS as possible so what comes over the wire is snappy, and we're actually kind of proud of where we have gotten to so far. It's not live yet due to some bugs in testing caused by captcha though.

At this point we've already established a way to build and compile react and postcss (specifically we're using tailwind) for stencil. Right now we're looking to do things like interface with webdav via dynamic data properties at render time but grabbing properties via graphql query ( gql ).

We're a enterprise level customer, so we're trying to start min-maxing on the features that BC brings to the table to really show off what the system can do when done right (also going for the awards thingy next year but that's a different story). Planning to do some post mortem write ups once we launch and make some samples for the community for cool things, but that's a bit of wishful thinking for a while still.

• Jordan