A senior Shopware developer on what a monthly release cadence, a rocky admin migration, and the platform’s new AI push actually mean for the person shipping client projects.
Iulian Beleiu has spent more than ten years in PHP and Symfony, most of it now inside Shopware. He runs migrations from Shopware 5 to 6 and across the 6.x line, builds custom B2B logic for agencies and scaling startups, and spends a good part of his week on the DevOps side of the job. We asked him what changed this year. He didn’t reach for the keynote highlights. He reached for the release calendar.
Where the time actually goes
His first Shopware project was a barbecue products shop. What made it click, he says, was how easy the platform was to extend: “Whenever I needed something custom, I could just add my own code without working against the system”. A decade later that’s still the pitch he’d give a newcomer. Symfony gives him the foundation. Shopware gives him products, checkout, orders, customers and an admin he doesn’t have to build from scratch, while still feeling like “a normal Symfony app underneath”.
A typical sprint, in his telling, is rarely just writing code. There are daily meetings and refinements, architecture decisions, development that mixes new features with debugging and code review, and DevOps work on top: deployments, environments, keeping production stable. “It’s deciding, building and shipping all together,” he says.
Fast releases, boring discipline
The developer experience has matured a lot since the early 6.3 and 6.4 days. Tooling is better, extension points are better, and most of the rough edges are gone. The trade-off is pace. Shopware now ships a feature release roughly every month: 6.7.9 landed in April 2026, 6.7.10 followed in May. That drumbeat cuts both ways. Fixes and improvements arrive faster and the schedule is at least predictable, but Beleiu won’t update a client project blindly. “My approach is boring on purpose. Test first, check plugin compatibility, run the tests suite, then ship”. Skip updates for a year, he warns, and one big painful upgrade replaces what should have been many small ones.
What still hurts
The admin build pipeline is where he still burns hours he’d rather not. The switch from Webpack to Vite in 6.7 modernized the frontend toolchain, but it also means a plugin built for 6.6 won’t simply load on 6.7, so agencies end up maintaining two builds and shipping separate releases. The move wasn’t free on performance either. Shopware’s own GitHub tracker has an open issue describing the exact regression Beleiu points to: the admin now loads through many small chunks instead of a few larger ones, and on a slow connection the login screen alone can fire a few hundred requests where it used to fire around twenty. The other recurring time sink, he says, is debugging cache and indexing problems, where the storefront looks wrong but the real cause sits somewhere else entirely.
Migrations: the invisible 80%
Clients almost always misjudge what a migration costs. They look at the theme or the product import and assume that’s the work. The real effort is in the custom plugins, the integrations, and the old checkout and pricing rules accumulated over years. A Shopware 5 to 6 jump makes it harder still: “a lot of it is not a port, it’s a rebuild”. “I usually tell clients the visible part is maybe 20% of the work”. His playbook is unglamorous on purpose: strip out what’s no longer needed, go plugin by plugin to find the real blocker, and test against a copy of real production data, since fake data hides the ugly cases. “Just upgrade it,” he says, “is never just an upgrade”.
What he’d actually put in front of a client today
On the newer core features, Beleiu draws a clear line between what he trusts and what he’s still watching. The Agentic Commerce sales channel, which generates a product feed (starting with a template for ChatGPT) so merchants don’t have to build a custom export from scratch, is the one he can already configure and reason about technically. Copilot and the agentic admin features he treats more carefully: useful as an assistant or a draft mechanism, not something he’d let make production changes without review. On Shopware’s talk of full MCP coverage, meaning every action in the platform reachable by an AI tool, he’s candid that it’s “more the direction they’ve announced than something I’ve seen fully proven,” and what he actually wants before he trusts it is visibility: exact permissions and a log of what an agent touched before anything important changes. Nexus, the orchestration layer meant to replace point-to-point ERP and CRM integrations, targets a problem he knows well, since integration glue eats a huge share of real project time. If it standardizes the boring 80% of that work, that’s real value, he says, but he’d still want to run it in production himself before trusting the marketing.
The infrastructure claims, tested
Hosting has moved from a server you log into by hand to cloud setups with monitoring and automated deployments, and PaaS takes a lot of that low-level work off a developer’s plate. Beleiu believes the faster-deployment claims, since git-driven environments genuinely do make rollbacks more repeatable. The response-time numbers he takes with more caution: “PaaS won’t fix bad custom code, a slow query, or missing caching”. His own non-negotiable before go-live hasn’t changed in years: checkout, payments, order mails, search, imports, scheduled tasks and the queue, all tested against realistic data, plus monitoring, backups and a rollback plan. “Production-ready basically means we already know what happens when something goes wrong, and we can recover fast”.
The bar just moved
None of this, Beleiu thinks, makes the job easier to coast through. “AI isn’t going to replace good developers, it raises the bar for all of us,” he says. Agents lean on clean data and solid architecture, so the fundamentals that are easy to cut corners on suddenly matter more, not less. The release notes get longer every month. The discipline underneath them hasn’t changed at all.
This is part one of a two-part interview with a developer actually building with Shopware today. Part two looks at why he builds here in the agentic era. Follow Shopware United so you don’t miss it.