I just joined this Slack channel and not sure where to ask this, but I'm very interested in learning more about possibly using Solidus for our ecommerce marketplace at https://goimagine.com The short story is we launched an MVP of our marketplace two years ago with a cheap PHP solution. We have grown to over 3,000 vendors and are bringing in some investment money to scale further. Over the past year we have built a Rails App off of the same MySQL db and re-built the vendor admin panel in Rails. So, currently the vendor admin panel is in Rails, but the buyer website is PHP. We are now looking to overhaul the consumer facing website using Rails. My question: Is it possible for Solidus to connect to our existing MySQL database? Could we continue to use the vendor admin panel we built in Rails but use Solidus for the customer facing marketplace site? Ultimately, my hope is to modernize our platform experience for buyers without downtime. Since we are a marketplace we have thousands of vendors relying on us and we can't let the site go dark during this development for an extended period of time. Any thoughts on transitioning our marketplace to Solidus?

Hey Jon, thanks for your interest in Solidus. I've not done much work with marketplaces myself, but it's a popular use case for Solidus. You should have no problem connecting a Solidus app to your MySQL database. Solidus officially supports Postgres and MySQL (we run our test suite against those), but should work with most databases supported by Rails. Because you can install Solidus into existing applications, you can also continue to use your vendor admin panel alongside Solidus in your app.

@Jared Norman thanks for the reply and that's wonderful news. I'll be interviewing some of the Solidus firms to find the right dev partner.