Magento News for the weeks 33 and 34

Today we are catching up with the Magento news of the weeks 33 and 34. This is what you might have missed.

Magento

• Classy Llama published an analyzing article regarding the Magento Theme Fallback mechanism. The flowchart is especially useful.
• Atwix wrote about Atwix_Sitemap, an extension for splitting the [cci]sitemap.xml[/cci] in multiple files to adhere to Google its maximum URL count specifications.
• Magento has released various patches (even fixing critical issues) for CE 1.9 and EE 1.14. Details can be found in the official knowledge base.
• In early August we learned that Fabrizio’s Fireside chat is here to stay. Recordings of the video chats – focused on Magento & testing – can be found on Youtube. James Cowie has written an accompanying article.

Magento 2

• 0.1.0-alpha90 has a long list of bugfixes, new service layers and improvements ranging from unifiying ACL to the ability to support 3rd-party Composer packages. The official changelog has the full story.
• As heard during Magento Imagine, Ben Marks has confirmed yet again that the Magento 2 release date is to be performed in two steps: beta/developer-release in December and an actual release candidate not until 2015.
• One of the features which won’t see the light until the actual release candidate, is support for simple configurable products.

Community

• On August the 5th, the Magento StackExchange Q&A platform has passed the mark of 10.000 questions asked. Not without fear, as Philip points out that the answer-to-question-rate is still not optimal. In response, StackExchange officials state that there’s nothing to worry about.
• OroCRM released the free OroCRM_Tracking extension to track customer data and seamlessly synchronize them between the OroCRM platform and Magento.
• As already spoilered in a previous round-up, MageKarma went online in August. It is a community driven website focused on reviewing Magento extensions.
• Some nice scenery from Tirol, where the first edition of Farmgento was held.

With weeks 33 and 34 covered, the last two weeks of August is what’s left before we are on track again. We will get to that, tomorrow. Faded header image background by Whiteghost.ink / CC BY-SA 3.0