Magento News for the weeks 37 & 38

In this bi-weekly round-up a lot of new extensions and updates, Meet Magento New York kicking off and four new Magento 2 code drops; here’s what the weeks 37 and 38 had in store.

Magento

• Branko Ajzele wrote about using the ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack for managing Magento logs.
• Erfan Imani published an article regarding block caching and how to programmatically invalidate or refresh cache items when system configuration of your module gets changed. Useful information.
• In part 4 of the Magento Fireside Chat about Magento testing, David Robinson walks us through the Menta Selenium Testing Framework for automated screenshots and Bastian Ike talks about Jenkins’ multi-configuration job “to test Magento modules with multiple Magento versions”.
• Peter Jaap got the hang of developing addons for n98-magerun and released a bunch of enhancing commands. Here’s the full list.
• In related news, Wojtek Naruniec listed his 10 favorite n98-magerun commands.
• For those using the Magento RWD theme, Eric Wiese has a reference implementation for displaying high resolution product images on the product detail and list pages using Picturefill.
• Aligent has visualised the order state flow of Magento for which it received a lot of praise from the community.
• Yaroslav Rogoza from Atwix updated his Magento PhpStorm File Templates for quickly generating dummies of repetitive files, like [cci]adminhtml.xml[/cci] and [cci]system.xml[/cci].
• Ho_Import got updated to version 1.4 and quickly thereafter to version 1.5.
• Marius released updates for his Switcher extension and is currently at version 1.1.0. The extension helps with changing the configurable products dropdowns to text, image or fixed color labels.
• Elastera released the EnterprisePageCacheSSL extension for making the Full Page Caching of Magento Enterprise work under HTTPS/SSL.
• After a remark of Rico Neitzel, Creare got to work and open sourced the CreareSEO extension.
• We are uncertain whether we would install it, but Tanel Raja updated “phpMyAdmin as a Magento Extension” to version 0.1.4. It adds phpMyAdmin to the Magento backend and automatically configures it with the database Magento is currently connected with.
• More database news: Magento released version 1.2 of the Database Repair Tool. It is available on the download page.

Magento 2

• 0.1.0-alpha93, 0.1.0-alpha94 0.1.0-alpha95 and 0.1.0-alpha96 got pushed to the public Magento 2 repository. Refer to the changelog for the full coverage.
• Note that with the latest builds, installation – both Composer and system installation – is a bit problematic. The team is said to be working on it.
• Quoting Marko Martinović: if you’re using xdebug with Magento 2, “don’t forget to set [cci]xdebug.max_nesting_level[/cci] to 200 before installing”.
• The Magento 2 webinar on Performance/Scalability Improvements And Composer took place. Here’s our summary and you can find the official recording here (direct link).
• Filip Svetlicic from Inchoo published an article diving into the Magento 2 frontend architecture. Nice to know he earned a sticker for that.
• Marius is playing with Magento 2, which resulted in the Breadcrumbs extension which adds breadcrumbs on the pages which do not have them. It can be used for learning purposes.

Community

• Some IDE news first: PHPStorm – probably the top favorite and arguably best IDE for Magento developers – has been updated to version 8.
• Allan MacGregor is working hard on his upcoming “Test Driven Magento Extension Development” book. Be sure to subscribe for launch and give him insight into what you are willing to pay for the book.
• Phillip Jackson and Kalen Jordan started a brand new Magento Podcast called MageTalk. Fun to listen and interesting content passes by so don’t forget to subscribe – on iTunes, too.
• We published a page which manifests Magento Certification Stats around the world. We will write about this some day.
• Another data analysis is from the hands of Tegan Snyder, who mapped all the Magento related Github repositories.
• Nick Weisser wrote about his experience with the first Magento Hackathon in Zurich and the upcoming second edition on October 25 and 26, right after the first edition of Meet Magento Switzerland.
• At the moment of writing Meet Magento New York takes place. Check out the dedicated MM14NY hashtag for a helicopter view.
• On September the 13th Meet Magento Romania took place. Loopaa has posted its impressions.
• A few days earlier, September the 6th, Meet Magento Ukraine took place. Atwix published a round-up.
• Mark your calendars: on the 7th and 8th of March 2015 the first edition of Mage Unconference will take place and Meet Magento Germany is scheduled for the 11th and 12th of May 2015.
• After the harsh truth, Tim is now looking for an audience for his new “Disgusting Truth of Magento Enterprise” talk. We thought of it being an ironic comment at first, but he’s actually looking for conferences to host him. Hopefully someone has the balls to get him on stage.

Hopefully we didn’t miss anything as a lot seems to have happened the past two weeks. In the next edition we will hopefully, among others, give you a good impression of what happened at Meet Magento New York. Last but not least: a shout-out to Matthias Zeis’ Magento-Neuigkeiten which our round-ups are based on. See you next time. Faded header image background by Whiteghost.ink / CC BY-SA 3.0