Magento News Roundup #20

Thousands of dollars in prize money, four interviews and the first MageUnconference ever: here’s what happened in the Magento world in the past two weeks.

Magento

• Magento has made its user guides for both community and enterprise edition online available. Not everything seems to be perfect, some information hasn’t been updated in a while and other info is simply incorrect.
• With Danslo_Aop you can bring aspect-oriented programming to your Magento 1.X projects. What you can do with that technique is best-read in the Go! AOP documentation which Danslo_Aop uses. One of the “selling points” is that Aop allows the interception known of Magento 2, to be used in Magento 1.X.
• Nadav Spiegelman has made some improvements to the accessibility of the default Magento RWD theme.
• Xtest is a new testing framework (Selenium + PHPUnit) for Magento. There’s a demo video which demonstrates its usage.
• Fabrizio launched a new webcast-series for Magento. The first part (of hopefully many more!) focuses on setting up a development environment.
• Allan Macgregor has made a Docker image available for easily setting up a Magento-suited stack.
• If you have a patch for Magento 1.X, you’re best off sending them to Piotr Kaminski.
• Apparently over 20.000 Magento stores are making use of a MailChimp integration.
• The 1.95.0 release of n98-magerun majorly updates the dev:console command (it now uses PsySH), adds PSR-4 autoloading support and fixes a variety of bugs.
• Paul Rogers published a compilation of tips and tricks for improving the page load speed of Magento.
• The Extension Lab released a few extensions on Github. Take for example StatusColors, which gives order management in the Magento backend much more visual information.
• After a question on Magento SE, some uproar was caused about a third party module reading the global/crypt/key configuration value and sending it abroad. Magento was quick in pulling the extension from Connect, but it signals a bigger problem in which Connect has no quality control whatsoever.
• In case your server has exec enabled, MB_CallingHome allows you to find any occurrences of third party modules calling home.
• Speaking about Magento Connect quality control, triplecheck has updated its rankings.
• Trick of the trade from Joshua Warren: Google’s mobile friendly test is giving specific advise for Magento installations.
• Erfan Imani explains why, since Magento 1.9, you shouldn’t be using local.xml for layout changes anymore.

Magento 2

• If you have some spare time left, the Magento 2 Extension Challenge invites developers to have a play with Magento 2 by either developing an extension which shares code between Magento 1 and 2, or develop a solution for programmatically converting code from Magento 1 to 2. All prizes include a free ticket to Magento Imagine (including flight and stay) and there’s up to $5000 in prize money.
• 0.42.0-beta10 and –beta11 bring, among others, the following changes:
  • The Magento_Config and Magento_Variable modules are introduced to have better separation of concerns.
  • Various improvements in the dependency injection framework have resulted in a combined performance improvement of 3%.
  • Various improvements to the setup tool have been made.
  • Installation of sample data has been streamlined and can now be added post-installation.
  • All inline JavaScript code has been eliminated.
• Magento 2 developer documentation can now be ran privately and they are still actively looking for contributions. If you haven’t already, you should definitely follow @MagentoDevDocs on Twitter for regular status updates.
• Peter Jaap has started writing about Magento 2 backend configuration and what the differences are with Magento 1.X.
• Daniel Fahlke released a Magento 2 extension for authenticating with Github. Another module of his should help with getting more insight when the Magento 2 system throws an exception.
• Alan Kent wrote about improving page speed for Magento 2. No hard figures, but more of an explanation of what Magento 2 is doing to increase performance. He also gave his personal opinion on the various types of dependency injection and why Magento 2 uses constructor injection.

Community

• The first Mage Unconference happened. Most attendees got straight back into the working week but write-ups, videos and more photos are dripping in.
• Right before the MageUC, Milan hosted the second edition of Meet Magento Italy.
• Meet Magento Germany has published its program.
• Domenic Santangelo wrote about the development of the new Magento Imagine website. Thorough article and an interesting read overall.
• In case you fancy a career at Magento, Inc, they are looking for a community manager for the “newly launched Magento online community forum”. Which implies that the new forum is coming soon!?
• Cloudways, which is regularly interviewing Magento community members, published interviews with Fabian Blechschmidt and Tom Robertshaw.
• More interviews: MageEngage got to talk with Karen from WebshopApps and Brent “the running man”.
• Earlier overheard during a webinar, there’s now more evidence the new Magento Connect will be backed by Composer. Magento 1.X, which officially doesn’t use Composer, will have its extensions available in tgz archives.
• Fabian Schmengler published a detailed comparison of Spryker with Magento. Spryker is a relatively new enterprise-oriented e-commerce platform.
• The OroCRM blog published an article on why Magento and OroCRM are a good match.

German speakers, don’t forget to check out Matthias Zeis’ Magento Neuigkeiten which we are basing our Magento News Roundups on. In case we forgot to mention you, 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. Header image background by Stefano Corso (Pensiero)