Transparent public Roadmap & Enhanced Community engagement for Medusa

[radeknapora]

Summary

Members of the Medusa community on Discord have raised concerns about insufficient visibility into the project’s direction, unanswered feature discussions, and limited avenues for contribution. Good ideas often sit un-implemented for months without pull requests, leaving contributors unsure where to help.

1. Key Issues

• No public Roadmap: The roadmap is gone from both the website and GitHub. Users can’t see what’s planned or in progress.
• Stalled Discussions: Feature requests like multi-language support, RBAC, variant-specific images, and custom tax modules remain unaddressed despite strong community interest.
• Limited Contribution Paths: Contributors lack clear guidance on how to turn ideas into PRs; many solutions stall without maintainers’ feedback.
• Outdated Docs & Support Gaps: Critical setup guides (e.g., Nginx, DigitalOcean) are broken or missing, and free support is inconsistent.

2. Proposed Actions

• Public Roadmap: Reinstate a ROADMAP or website section with versioned milestones and status labels.
• Regular Updates: Publish monthly dev-updates on GitHub or the blog, summarizing shipped features, ongoing work, and roadmap changes.
• Community Calls: Host quarterly AMAs or live sessions for direct Q&A with maintainers.
• Triage & Contribution Guide:
  • Label discussions by status (e.g., review, planned, needs help).
  • Provide clear CONTRIBUTING guidelines and “good first issue” tags.
• Documentation Audit: Fix and expand setup tutorials, adding end-to-end guides for common B2C/B2B scenarios.

3. Community-Requested Features

• Multi-language storefronts
• RBAC for Admin API & dashboard
• Variant-specific images
• Custom tax provider integration

4. Benefits

• Trust & Adoption: Transparency builds confidence.
• Active Contributions: Clear processes empower the community.
• Reduced Support Load: Up-to-date docs cut repetitive questions.
• Competitive Position: Shows Medusa’s commitment compared to alternatives.

[TheHypnoo]

Hello, thank you for initiating this discussion. My opinion after the short time I have been working with MedusaJS is that I have found it challenging to discern the direction of the project. I have encountered issues and PRs that have been open for some time and are automatically closed without resolution.

I hope this is addressed, as we know that this is an open project, but there is no way to customise it 100% because if you do, you lose the option of updates from the team.

Clarity in the project would give a better impression that the project is still active and has a good foundation.

[plenge]

Completely second this concern! + 👍

[avonian]

If this continues, maybe some veterans can step in and lead a fork?

[scherddel]

I completely agree with your observations, and thank you for raising this important issue. There's a concerning pattern where the community seems to be viewed more as a threat than an opportunity. It raises the question: why open source a project if genuine community contributions are consistently rejected or ignored?

I deeply believe in this project—I've spent years building similar solutions myself and understand the value it provides. However, I'm genuinely worried that without meaningful improvement in community engagement and contribution acceptance, this project risks stagnation and eventual decline.

The open source model thrives on collaboration, but that requires maintainers to embrace community input rather than dismiss it. I hope we can find a path forward that better leverages the enthusiasm and expertise of contributors who want to help this project succeed.

[radeknapora]

Thank you for expressing this so clearly! I share your concerns wholeheartedly. Open source should be a collaborative space where passionate contributors feel empowered, not sidelined.

Like you, I believe in the potential of this project. But belief alone isn’t enough there needs to be a real commitment to openness, not just in code, but in mindset. I truly hope the maintainers recognize this moment as an opportunity to rebuild trust and strengthen the community, rather than allow it to fade.

[TheHypnoo]

I agree with you. I haven't been working with Medusa for very long, but despite my lack of knowledge, I like the approach and see potential for the future. I have often wanted to collaborate by creating PR, but I realise that they don't give it much importance, which makes me wonder why I should bother. I believe in this project, but I get the feeling that contributors only do things that interfere with their personal projects.

I hope someone from Medusa will speak up and give us something to resolve this, and we'll see how collaboration in open source increases.

*I don't want to ‘insult’ anyone, it's my opinion and my vision, but that doesn't mean I'm not wrong.

[scherddel]

If anyone interprets this as an insult, that reaction may actually highlight the core issue. I'm speaking from genuine experience—countless instances where I've offered improvements or assistance, only to be confronted with silence or dismissive responses that carried an annoyed tone. I'm uncertain what has led to this atmosphere over the years, but I feel genuinely sorry for everyone working on this project who may have lost the passion and spirit that once drove it forward.

There's also an uncomfortable reality we should address: the commercialization of Medusa through cloud offerings may be influencing these dynamics. I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but this wouldn't be the first open source project to suffer when commercial interests overshadow community collaboration.

If financial sustainability is indeed a concern, there are proven alternatives. Many successful projects have addressed this challenge by actively engaging their communities and securing funding through donations, bounties, or transparent sponsorship models. These approaches can actually strengthen rather than alienate the contributor base.

The irony is that a thriving, engaged community often becomes the best marketing and development resource any project can have. When we alienate contributors, we're not just losing code—we're losing advocates, users, and the collective wisdom that makes open source projects truly powerful.

I remain hopeful that we can find a way forward that honors both the project's sustainability needs and the community's desire to contribute.

[andriinuts]

I completely agree with your points. I actively used Medusa from version v1.3.4 through to v1.17.3, but unfortunately, most of my merge requests and issues were either ignored or never acknowledged by the core team. It feels like community contributions are not a priority, perhaps due to internal goals driven by investors.

For example, translation support has been promised for years, but it’s still missing. I even opened a discussion about it over 3 years ago (link here), and despite significant community interest, there has been little to no progress.

Similarly, basic and widely requested features like adding images to product variants have been repeatedly overlooked, even though they are relatively easy to implement. I created the medusa-plugin-variant-images plugin for version v1.17.3, so I know firsthand how straightforward this functionality is to support within the core system.

After a long time of trying to contribute and support Medusa, I eventually decided to stop investing my time in Medusa due to the persistent lack of response from the team. I switched to exploring other solutions and discovered Vendure - and I was honestly impressed. All my merge requests were reviewed and merged, and any issues I raised received prompt responses and even fixes from the project maintainer.

Vendure already includes many of the features that are still missing in Medusa and, most importantly, it works reliably. I would highly recommend giving Vendure a try or at least exploring alternative solutions, rather than trying to fork Medusa, which currently has a very complex and hard-to-maintain codebase.

[TheHypnoo]

It is sad to see how a person who was using the platform decided to leave because the Medusa team ignores the users. I will check out Venture and see how it goes. In my case I work for a specific client and I decided to migrate from Shopify to MedusaJS, but I'm running into obstacles of ‘simple’ features not implemented or internal bugs without solution.

Thanks for giving your opinion about it.

These opinions are what the developer should see before deciding whether to use Medusa, unluckily I was too late to see this, but another user should be able to see what they are getting into before it is too late.

[radeknapora]

Thanks for sharing your story. I’ve taken a closer look at Vendure and I have to say, it does offer many of the features that Medusa is still missing. The RBAC system looks solid, and the maintainers’ commitment to the community is impressive.

That said, I personally find Medusa’s admin panel much more polished - modern, clean, and intuitive. It’s unfortunate that the project hasn’t managed to fully leverage its potential and the energy coming from the community.

Right now, I’m unsure about continuing to invest more time into Medusa and have started exploring other options - particularly Payload CMS, which is also working on an ecommerce template and plugin. The Payload team clearly cares about its community as well, which is equally impressive.

Still, I truly hope the Medusa team will reconnect with the core values of open source - transparency, collaboration, and community-driven development and steer the project in a direction that empowers its users and contributors alike.

[seon-devdev]

thanks for sharing your experience. have been also testing medusa for big work project but also ran into basic missing features like variant images and very complex to add some custom data like brand.

why no answer from team after 2 weeks? also makes not so confident to choose medusa.

thx will check vendure too, first look very promising

[olivermrbl]

Hi all.

First and foremost, thank you for engaging with and contributing to Medusa. It means the world to us that so many of you are genuinely interested about our general direction and the well-being of the community.

This discussion raises good concerns and we have discussed internally how to improve our collaboration with our community going forward. I will share what we intend to do below and some context about how we got to where we are today.

Before that, I want to stress we remain fully committed to ensuring the open-source project’s success, even though we are a company and need to make money. We love open-source software and we want as many people as possible using Medusa. Ultimately, some of those users will choose to pay for our commercial products, and this is our business model in a nutshell. We want Medusa to be around for the next 100 years, jeopardizing that for a bit of short commercial success is not our plan. And for the record our investors are fully aligned with that.

Project visibility

We recognize the need for better transparency into Medusa’s direction and roadmap. We haven’t been great at providing this in the past. Since launching Medusa 2.0 late 2024, we have focused the majority of our efforts on squashing bugs and improving robustness of the core. By doing so, we traded off working on larger features such as RBAC and multi-language support. We haven’t been transparent about this focus and that is understandably frustrating. We will do better here.

We are not quite ready to fully commit to a public roadmap as priorities tend to shift quite a lot. What we will do, however, is share our focus on a monthly basis. This should give visibility into what’s being worked on, and where contributions may be welcome.

Community contributions

We are incredibly fortunate to have external contributors, like you, who invest time in building features and solving bugs. So let me be clear: we deeply value your dedication and time. I acknowledge we have not been good enough at reviewing contributions in the past, and I would like to clarify why that happens and how we plan to improve to ensure your continued involvement with our project.

We want new features to follow our architectural patterns and UX guidelines. Our internal development process therefore involves structured planning and design sessions to align on what we want to solve and how. These sessions give our team context about the expected implementation, making the review process easier and faster. External contributions work differently. Since we don’t have any planning process before changes land in a PR, we lack context about why and how something was built. This makes it hard to know where to start, and review processes drag out. This is hard to change, as running the same planning process with external contributors is not feasible.

With that said, we understand that working on something without getting feedback is a discouraging experience, and we need to make sure this does not happen.

Looking forward

Now, let me explain how we intend to improve going forward:

• Monthly updates: we will introduce a section in our monthly newsletter that describes current and near-future work. This section will also be published on our blog and reposted across community channels, including GitHub. As mentioned, this will not be a fully-fledged roadmap, but it will give context about the direction we are headed in and how you can help. Over time this can evolve into a more structured roadmap.
• Community support: we will treat GitHub Issues and Discussions with higher priority and track them in our project management tooling. This should ensure a fast response and avoid stale threads. Related to this, I want to remind everyone that Medusa’s Discord server is run and primarily used by the community. If you have issues, requests, or questions please use GitHub, so the core team can attend to them.
• Contribution guide: we will update our contribution guide to reflect the process for contributing larger features as well as bugs. We are committed to ensuring your contributions are seen and that you do not waste your time.

For updates on what has shipped please see the release notes shared here on GitHub. These can also be accessed from medusajs.com/changelog.

Regarding the issues with our documentation, @shahednasser in our team is actively monitoring and fixing all reported feedback. If you encounter issues please report it so we can address it. Additionally, Shahed consistently publishes new guides for Medusa, if you have suggestions to things she should cover, feel free to share them in our GitHub Discussions similar to feature requests.

Again, we are deeply appreciative of your interest in and contributions to Medusa. We recognize the concerns around community engagement and are grateful you hold us accountable. We will do what we can to improve in the near future.

[sergkoudi]

Hi Oliver,
Thank you for your detailed response and action plan, which I find very motivating.

Could you just add what are you going to do with stale issues like that one #12477?

[olivermrbl]

By giving higher priority to GitHub Issues, the goal is that issues never reach a stale state.

In this specific case, it looks like an easy addition to our documentation. Maybe @shahednasser could look into adding this. I'll reopen this issue until it has been resolved.

[sergkoudi]

I believe that there may be many other stale issues that have been overlooked but are still relevant. It might be helpful for you, if the authors test them again on a new version and promote in a way you define.

[olivermrbl]

For sure. We will review our issues board in the next couple of weeks, as we plan what to work on next.

[fogine]

I agree with this. I've spent time in the past creating bug reports and even submitting a PR (encouraged by a Medusa team member) to fix the issue. However, the PR was left unanswered and unreviewed for over a year. I also spent time rebasing the PR to keep it up to date, only for it to be ignored.

Recently I created a new one if you are interested #13148 as the issue is bugging me.
This is the original PR that has been left behind: #11562