Magento News for the weeks 21 and 22

In collaboration with Matthias Zeis (@mzeis), we are cross-posting biweekly summaries of Magento news in English. Here’s the first edition, of week 21 and 22.

Community

• The seventh edition of the Magento-Stammtisch (Stammtisch: informal group meeting. Think user group) in Wien (Germany) occured.
• Leipzig played host for a Magento Hackathon, after which the German Meet Magento conference occured (English recap).
• All of the German festivities were a bit overshadowed by Magento Imagine and the accompanying hackathon; some hackathon pictures by Fabrizio. Interesting demo of a BigBrother-extension by Daniel Sloof here.
• After the hackathon, Magento Imagine went live with most notably the Magento 2 release date, an update for the 1.X series and Ben Marks stepping up as the developer evangelist for the Magento platform.
  • There were a few keynotes, breakout sessions and other presentations. Most of them can be found on slideshare.
  • Chris Guerra from Blue Acorn wrote a Magento Imagine recap
  • A list of 41 takeaways from Magento Imagine.
  • Highlights from the Cloud Conversion blog
• A few days after Magento Imagine, Meet Magento NL occured. Impressions by Carmen here. Inchoo’er Aaron Stanic his recap here. All presentations can be found on Dutchento its blog.
• Back to Germany: a new conference is coming soon called the MageUnconference. Other than a house style, not much is known yet.
• Roy Rubin left his personal remarks on leaving eBay/Magento.

Magento

• During Magento Imagine, Magento CE 1.9 and EE 1.14 were released.
• There is now a “Magento Solution Specialist Certification“. The certification is processed through Prometric. More information in the official study guide. Write-up about the certification by Inchoo here.
• Atwix wrote about the development of an extension called Blockspeed, which can be used to measure performance of block rendering speed.
• Copius released the Checkout Simulator. A bash script for testing the absolute maximum performance of the Magento checkout process.
• Atwix also wrote an interesting article about Magento and PHPUnit.
• For those into testing (and you should!) James Cowie wrote about PHPSpec and Magento.
• Cm_RedisSession got updated to better process bots and crawlers to reduce wasted resources.
• SMTP Pro got updated to version 2 earlier. Here’s a write-up by Ashley himself.
• Alan Storm covered the newly added parent/child functionality for themes in Magento CE 1.9 and EE 1.14.
• Colin wrote about efficient Magento asset management by making use of merged asset groups.

Magento 2

• 2.0.0.0-dev77 goes mobile-first for the new Blank theme, various fixes and a whole lot of functional tests have been added.
• 2.0.0.0-dev78 was a bit pale in comparison (recovery from Magento Imagine) but fixed quite a few issues nevertheless.
• 2.0.0.0-dev79 got into tax calculation issues, added more functional tests and another long list of all sorts of issues being fixed.
• Note that this is the smallest of the summaries, the official changelog goes more in-depth.
• Fabrizio keeps updating his code statistics regarding the Magento code base. Everything up to dev77 is taken into account.
• Alan Kent (eBay/Magento) started writing about Magento 2 on his personal blog. His first post describes the goals of Magento 2. Interesting to see someone close to the process reflecting.
• Alan’s second post dives into the Magento 2 Service Layer; a layer between presentation and business logic to help streamline separation of concerns.
• Thirdly, but probably not his last writing on the matter, Alan describes the modularization of Magento 2.

And that’s a wrap. Please note that the original “Magento-Neuigkeiten” contains a lot of content in German which we have stripped out for convenience of our English audience. We hope to provide you with a new list in two weeks. Follow us on Twitter to stay up to date or let us know if you’ve got something we forgot. Faded header image background by Whiteghost.ink / CC BY-SA 3.0