Magento News Roundup #18

Magenticians
February 9, 2015

Busy days and we apologize for not fulfilling the Magento News Roundup two weeks ago. Here’s a double-sized edition to get back on track.

Because in reality this should have actually been split into Magento News Roundup #18 and #19 – four weeks instead of two – it’s a bit bigger than usual. Items on the lists are not necessarily in chronological order.

Magento

In the middle of January a lot of Magento store APIs were inaccessible due to servers hosting XML schemes required for SOAP requests being down. Blame Microsoft!
In Magento Indexing 101, Derrik Nyomo describes on a rudimentary level what Magento indexing is and how it works.
More on indexing: Kevin Schroeder has published a comprehensive post in which he dives into the new(ish) indexing of Magento Enterprise Edition 1.13.
In another post of Kevin, he sums up why Redis is a great option for a worker queue in Magento.
Earlier, Kevin wrote about realtime logging for Magento. Proof of concept can be found on Github.
Apparently the New York Times Store is now running on Magento.
For those having problems with locking SELECTs on the eav_entity_store store table, adding an additional index which is not available by default, might solve the problem.
Mathew Beane wrote an extensive piece on clustering Redis with Magento.
n98-magerun 1.94.0 has been released which introduces a variety of fixes and improvements, adds the ability to disable commands in case of command-namespace conflicts and now allows to manage EE giftcards via the command line.
The develop branch of the Magento Testing Framework is still seeing regular updates and is now at 1.0.0-rc.15.
Paul Rogers is updating his definitive guide to Magento SEO occasionally.
Sander published a trimmed down price.phtml by removing all the Weee stuff.
In case you still haven’t switched to PHPStorm + Magicento, there’s a collection of snippets for frontend developers using Sublime Text.

Magento 2

The stable version of Magento 2 is now at 0.42.0-beta7. Here is a rough summary of what happened in four weeks – that’s since 0.42.0-beta3 – of development:
- The composer.json file now hosts version information for themes instead of theme.xml. This implies that themes will see more dependency of Composer.
- PHP 5.6 is now a requirement for Magento 2 and PHP 5.4 is no longer supported.
- Uploaded images will be compressed
- A new admin theme is in the works?!
- The Magento_Core module is being outphased.
- Magento 2 now supports Varnish 4.
- Magento 2 will be making use of Jasmine and PhantomJS for JavaScript testing.
- The performance toolkit has been improved.
- The setup tool has been improved and now allows to programmatically disable and enable modules.
- More than 70 bugs fixed!
- Don’t forget to check out the changelog for the full story.
New in the Magento 2 workflow are “up for grabs” issues which the community can work on. Ben Marks has a blog post with more background information.
Ben also has a blog post in which he reaches out to the community for feedback on Paypal and Magento integration.
A set of people from the Magento 2 team got on the Magento subreddit and participated in an “ask-us-anything“-chat. We compiled 7 interesting takeaways.
Alan Kent explains the difference between Magento 2 containers and blocks in the layout system.
In a poll by the same Alan, he asks the community for input on whether XSD references (in XML files) should be real URLs or not.
Marko Martinovic benchmarked Magento 2 beta 3 (0.42.0-beta3) against Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1.0 and discovered it is much slower.
The Magento 2 vimeo album has a couple of new videos ranging from installing Magento 2 sample data to a global overview of the Magento 2 framework.
WebShopApps translated the Magento 2 roadmap for merchants. I.e. when, how and should I update my webshop to Magento 2 and what happens with my Magento 1 store?
In the previous edition we mentioned James Cowie is working on MageSpec for Magento 2 and the latest news is that his POC works: it can generate Magento 2 compatible code.
gatling_magento2 by Creatuity is a Gatling-project for stress-testing Magento 2 stores. It currently only tests the checkout process as a guest.
Creatuity its CEO (Joshua Warren) wrote about the missing Magento 2 certifications and how the lack thereof might become a problem with identifying capable Magento 2 developers.
Other assorted writings about Magento 2 in the recent weeks:
- BrainSINS posted an article about Magento 2 and dependency injection. Not being judgmental here, but it seems to be heavily inspired by our article on Magento 2 and dependency injection.
- More on dependency injection: James Cowie gives a quick overview on MageHero.
- Alan MacGregor explains what Magento 2 its service contract pattern is.
- On the Inchoo blog they have a quick look at what Magento 2 logging entails.
- The magestore blog has a two–part series on creating a Magento 2 theme.
Cyrill Schumacher is on a run:
- He released an extension which makes the Twig template engine work with Magento 2.
- An other extension does the same trick but uses Markdown as template engine.
- He open-sourced his Hotkeys module which – as the name suggests – adds keyboard shortcuts to your Magento backend.
- His Magento2-Data-Migration tool comes with absolutely no warranty but should be able to help migrating a Magento 1 database to Magento 2.
Speaking about database migrations: Alan Kent wrote about the official plans.
Ignacio Riesco is waiting on the merchant-oriented meeting for Magento 2, something like the Magento 2 developer forum held at Magento Developer Paradise. Head of product management at Magento notes that they are already happening.
n98-magerun2 is still under heavy development. In the February project update, Christian Münch gives insight into how progress is coming along.

Community

From 11 to 14 January the 4th edition of Magento Developer Paradise took place. nrappfactory and openstream have a recap.
The over coupling organization of the international Meet Magento events is now the non-profit Meet Magento Association.
Meet Magento IT published its schedule. Meet Magento NL is still looking for speakers and the call for speakers of Meet Magento DE has recently ended.
The Mage Unconference has published a schedule and a few frequently asked questions.
Next week it’s time for the second edition of MageStackDay. If you have some spare time the 13th and/or 14th of February, be sure to participate.
Mathew Beane drew a comparison between Drupal Commerce and Magento Community Edition concluding that “Magento clearly wins this round” but “[…] does have a few downsides, such as the lack of a solid content managment tool”.
MageEngage, by David Manners, is a new Magento podcast in which he interviews the Magento community in video form. The first episode welcomes Anna Völkl – to some better known under her “rescue Ann” Twitter handle.
IBM Cloud, Azure and Joyent are now part of the Magento Hosting Partner ecosystem. Would be interesting to know on which conditions that happened.
Alessandro Ronchi is maintaining a list of useful Magento resources. Contributions are welcome.
After PayPal, eBay is possibly splitting eBay Enterprise into a separate entity. Lots of opinion pieces and speculation on that matter.
Even though Magento is part of eBay Enterprise, a potential split will have no impact on the Magento 2 timeline.
Z-Ray, debugging software by Zend, is now compatible with Magento. There is a demo available. Mathew explains what exactly you can do with Z-Ray.
Akeneo went into detail with its future plans for the Akeneo Magento Connector.
And to wrap things up: recent discoveries show that Magento has a .9917 search-correlation with Voltaren gel. That can’t be a coincidence!

That’s about it! Again, apologies for being two weeks too late but hopefully this double-sized edition makes up for it. If you fluent German, don’t forget to check out Matthias Zeis’ Magento Neuigkeiten which we are basing our Magento News Roundups on. In case we forgot your blog post, made a mistake or missed an awesome Magento project, let us know on Twitter, in the comments below or send us an email. Thanks for reading!

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