Magento News for the weeks 45 & 46

In the past two weeks Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 got released, MageStackDay helped answering 189 questions and a handful of new Magento slides are now out in the open.

Magento

• Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 got released. Even though it’s a minor version bump, there’s a whole list of additions aimed to deliver “superior capabilities to merchants” including but not limited to: a new drag-and-drop visual merchandising tool, MySQL 5.6 and PHP 5.5 support and better responsive email templates.
• In the release notes of EE 1.14.1 is noted that “Magento Community Edition 1.9.1 is Coming Soon”. It will offer the base line of the Enterprise Edition update.
• Though standard available in EE 1.14.1 and the soon to be released CE 1.9.1, Blue Acorn released an extension for integrating Google Universal Analytics with Magento.
• Atwix wrote about an issue regarding duplicated product URL keys in Magento Community Edition and how to fix it with a shell script.
• Useful repository: Michael Smith has a collection of Docker containers for quickly setting up a Magento development environment.
• Tegan Snyder posted a gist with configuration instructions for getting Magento running with HHVM. The performance difference benchmarked with that configuration is remarkable.
• Vinai wrote a comprehensive article on Magento setup scripts which “follows a similar structure as the chapters from the Grokking Magento book”.
• Meanbee_Svg is a new module which should help with embedding SVG files.
• Paul Hachmang is working on a “rule based pricing system” for Magento by making use of the Math libraryMath library.
• Firegento_PDF got updated to version 1.3.0.
• Inchoo updated their Ultimate Magento robots.txt examples.
• You can now partially pretend Magento 2 is already here by installing the Magento 2 admin theme in your Magento 1.X installation.
• Marius released an extension which adds a stock-filter to the layered navigation. This extension is redundant if your store doesn’t display out-of-stock products.
• Demac published a Study Guide for people looking to become Magento Certified Solution Specialist.

Magento 2

• 0.1.0-alpha103 has a lot of UI improvements including more semantic HTML and Microdata and Schema vocabulary for product content. There is now also a cron job in the Customer module for periodically cleaning up the [cci]customer_vistor[/cci] table.
• We continued working on the Magento 2 Backend Launcher by adding functionality to browse through configuration sections.
• Alan Kent wrote about his thoughts on how people from the outside can help with removing unneeded features from Magento 2.
• Additionally, Alan wrote about the idea of categorizing Magento modules. Good to see thoughts are being spilled into the open for discussion.
• Development of n98-magerun2 has begun.

Community

• With 189 additional questions answered, MageStackDay managed to push the acceptance rate on Magento SE from 68.62% to 70.48%.
• Cloudways published an interview with Matthias Zeis.
• The #SinceIStartedWithMagento hashtag gives a good (if not hilarious) overview of what Magento does to you as a person.
• Magento Commerce Experience Research Labs performed another Magento Connect user survey.
• VersionEye is now tracking the two biggest Magento module repositories.
• In the previous edition we already listed a few presentations from MageTitans. Here’s more news:
  • George Schiopu wrote about his personal impressions and has a photo album available.
  • Creare publised a “Big Fat” review of MageTitans.
  • The MageTitans website published a retrospective of the event.
  • On the MageTitans YouTube channel you can now find recordings of all presentations.
• The PHP[World] conference from 10 to 14 November hosted a variety of Magento talks:
  • Joshua Warren with “A Successful Magento Project From Design to Deployment“, “Magento, Client, Budget, TDD – What You Can, Can’t And Must Test” and “The Care and Feeding of Magento Developers“
  • Tobias Zander with “What’s new in Magento 2?“
  • Thijs Feryn with “Making Magento go fast“
  • Fabrizio Branca with “Rock-solid Magento Development” and “High-Performance Magento in the Cloud“
• Fabian wrote about the goal of the Mage Unconference. Interesting is that it still isn’t settled whether it will take place; it depends on the ticket sales.
• MageTalk Episode 10 (“MageHero“) and 11 (““Kliptork Means Bed” & MageTitans“) aired. The hosts of MageTalk were featured in the Llama Commerce Show.

Those who master German, don’t forget to check out Matthias Zeis’ Magento-Neuigkeiten which our round-ups are based on. If we missed a module release, made a mistake or you want to say hello, let us know on Twitter, in the comments below or send us an email. Faded header image background by Whiteghost.ink / CC BY-SA 3.0