In Drupal Commerce 1.x, we used the Commerce Fancy Attributes and Field Extractor modules to render attributes more dynamically than just using simple select lists. This let you do things like show a color swatch instead of just a color name for a customer to select.

Fancy Attributes on a product display in Commerce Kickstart 2.x.

In Commerce 2.0-alpha4, we introduced specific product attribute related entity types. Building on top of them and other contributed modules, we can now provide fancy attributes out of the box! When presenting the attribute dropdown, we show the labels of attribute values. But since attribute values are fieldable, we can just as easily use a different field to represent it, such as an image or a color field. To accomplish this, we provide a new element type that renders the attribute value entities as a radio button option.

Read more to see an example configuration.

Over time, modules update their shipped configuration such as rules, views, node types. Users expect to get these updates when they update the modules. For example, Drupal Commerce 1.x provides over eleven default views and rules. From release to release, these Views and Rules were enhanced with new features or bug fixes reported by the community.

Take the order management view. In a future release of Drupal Commerce, we may add a newly exposed filter to the view. In Drupal 7 the view would automatically be updated unless it was overridden. That is not the case in Drupal 8.

Drupal 8 introduces the Configuration Management system. While robust, it changes how we work with the configuration in comparison to Drupal 7. Instead of a module owning configuration, configuration is now owned by the site. When a module is installed, its configuration is imported. On module update, no configuration updates are performed. Instead, the module must write an update hook to perform one of the following updates:

The holidays are a distant memory, and Drupal 8 contrib work is happening in full force. Time for another 2.x alpha. The past three weeks have seen bug fixes, test work, and many internal cleanups. But let's focus on the bigger changes.

Reminder: Commerce 2.x alphas are NOT production ready. No upgrade path is provided between alphas, a full reinstall is needed each time.

Read on to find out what's new...

Say hi. (who are you and what do you do in the Commerce ecosystem)

Hello! I'm Josh Taylor, a PHP Developer living in Melbourne, Australia who focuses on Drupal 7/8 and Symfony2 projects. I've been involved with helping Commerce 2.x in my spare time (not as much lately due to time constraints) to help make it the go-to eCommerce platform for users.

How did you get involved with contributing to Drupal Commerce?

benjy (Ben Dougherty) mentioned that Drupal Commerce was in the planning phase. I got really excited and checked it out, and started to contribute back small fixes with the help of bojanz (Bojan Zivanovic). Then I just kept going - I hope to contribute more back in 2016 when I have more time, especially as clients start to move onto Drupal 8.