In the ever-evolving landscape of ecommerce, staying ahead of the curve is not just beneficial; it's essential for maintaining a competitive edge and ensuring a seamless customer experience. Shopware provides regular updates that add new functionality and improvements to the software, which help merchants stay on top. But, keeping your ecommerce system always up-to-date seems to be a challenging task besides the day-to-day business. We aim to provide our customers with the right balance between stability and new updates. Therefore, we would like to introduce you to our new release policy, which provides helpful information about Shopware releases.
What is the Shopware Release Policy?
We published a new site with all the relevant information about Shopware releases. Here, you will find our new version-support calendar, which provides information about all currently maintained Shopware versions, how long they are provided with which kind of updates. In addition, you can learn more about the different types of updates and their impact.
Extended Support
We are committed to publishing a new major version of Shopware 6 each year. It is a pivotal strategy for the continuous evolution of Shopware to innovate and ensure that our software meets the ever-changing demands of the market.
Likewise, we want to offer customers the right balance between new updates and stability. Therefore, we are introducing extended support for the previous major version in the form of direct patch updates for the last minor version of the major version cycle. These releases will include selective bug fixes and security updates via direct patch updates. Other minor versions of the previous major cycle will still get security fixes via the security plugin, as usual.
The extended support is offered for one year until the next major release supersedes it. Following the extended support time frame, there will be one year of additional security updates via the security plugin, resulting in two years of support for these kinds of versions.
When does the extended support come into effect?
We will introduce this change with the release of Shopware 6.6 this year, where Shopware 6.5.8.0 will become the first version with extended support for the previous 6.5 major cycle. So, if you are not ready yet to do the major update to 6.6 this year, make sure to at least update to the latest minor version of 6.5 to benefit from the extended support.
Security Support for Shopware 6.4 until 2025
The transition into this new release schedule will be done step by step to ensure no one is left behind. We committed to continuing the support of all minor versions of Shopware 6.4 with security updates until the major update of Shopware 6.7 in 2025. The updates are provided via the security plugin as usual. If you are still using Shopware 6.4 and haven’t yet updated to the latest major version, this year is the right time to plan your update. You should use the opportunity to upgrade directly to Shopware 6.6, which will be published in March.
Visit our Release Policy page
To see this information displayed visually, head over to our new release policy site and look at our new version-support calendar. In this section, you will also find the release notes of upcoming Shopware releases, along with helpful information about the contents of each release. Make sure to check it out.