Magento News for the weeks 25 and 26

Let’s gloss over a fresh load of extensions, blog posts and other interesting Magento content. If you master German, check out Matthias his original blog post which our “Magento News”-round-ups are based on.

Magento

• Alan Storm wrote about the development of a new n98-magerun [cci]extension:validate[/cci] command for handling file permission issues with Magento Connect.
• Atwix covered adding a custom form fieldset type for the Magento backend.
• Tom Robertshaw from Meanbee released an extension for integrating Mailcheck with Magento. It’s available on Github.
• More and more videos of the presentations from Meet Magento Germany are being uploaded to the official Youtube channel.
• Apparently Magento its DB Repair Tools are no longer maintained.
• WebShopApps openly criticized Magento Connect. Ben was quick to respond with a cryptic “to be continued”, so we hope to hear more from that soon. A few days later, WebShopApps threw another hiss about fraudulent extension-copies on Magento Connect. It stirred quite some discussion.
• Anyone who purchased Vinai’s Grokking Magento, is able to download an updated version. On top of that, existing owners can also download a Kindle-version of the book.
• More on Vinai: he recently put his new website online, including an article about “Pre-loading For Scalability” which details a common optimization technique for Magento.

Magento 2

• 2.0.0.0-dev82 brings more unit tests, functional tests and a whole list of bugfixes (including merged community efforts). Notably the Service API for Magento_Catalog got an upgrade with now also supports products and their attributes.
• 2.0.0.0-dev83 builds further on the Magento_Catalog Service API with support for product group prices and product attribute media. It also goes further with porting Tax Features from Magento 1.X. And, of course, a long list of fixes and newly added tests.
• Alan Kent has two new articles on his blog. The first is about front-end development with Magento 2. Secondly, he wrote about the reasoning behind LESS instead of SASS supportin Magento 2
• If you want to give Magento 2 a swing, we welcomed Tim with a guest-post on installing Magento 2 with Composer.

Community

• Meet Magento Switzerland has a venue and here are the pictures. Looks classy.
• Andre Flitsch and Andreas Vogt are organizing Farmgento, a nature driven hackathon in Tirol. It takes place from August the 7th till the 10th. If you are interested, don’t tinker too long because tickets are sparse.
• There’s always interesting content on the MageWorx blog; they gave their impressions of Meet Magento Italy and posted a guide which can help with preparing your store for the summer season.
• We interviewed Ben Marks on his role as developer evangelist. A tad later Ben participated in an ask-me-anything chat on /r/magento.
• We also published a list with 8 useful resources for the Magento Certified Developer Exam. Hope it helps!
• In an opinionated piece by Philippe, he gives his two cents on The Future of Magento. Interesting points are raised, including 12 wounds which Magento is suffering from.
• Due to ongoing spam and other issues, the Magento Forums have been put into read-only mode. Magento, Inc recommends to use Magento StackExchange instead.

And that’s the end of the weeks 25 and 26. Hopefully we see you around for the next round-up in around two weeks from now. If you have anything to add, be sure to let us know. Faded header image background by Whiteghost.ink / CC BY-SA 3.0