The latest release of the Open Food Network was deployed this week. Although it doesn’t look different we’ve made some big changes to improve the performance of your shopfront behind the scenes.

Shopfronts with up to 10,000 products will load within 2 seconds. This is more than 200 times faster! No more waiting… no matter how big or small your shopfront! Searching and filtering is super fast too.

Alongside this major performance improvement we’ve stripped back a lot of complexity. This means that some of the tiny and annoying bugs of the past – like prices not updating instantly or issues with the tagging functionality – have all been fixed.

Behind the scenes we’ve also been making big changes to our API to improve the way OFN can integrate with external systems. We’ve been rolling out performance improvements across the system including to reports and a number of the admin pages.

October marked the annual Hacktoberfest, a month dedicated to open source code and growing contributors. The Open Food Network community have welcomed contributions from a number of new and experienced developers that have found us as part of Hacktoberfest events. You can thank these talented and committed folks for some small fixes that make the user interface easier to understand – including some red * to indicate required fields, some additional translation fields and some placeholder text. Thank you Hacktoberfest contributors!

Aaaannnnnnd we’re very excited of what we’ve got coming up next:

  • More performance improvements on reports and the admin Order Cycles pages
  • Improvements to make shopping on mobile and tablet a joy