Magento News for the weeks 49 & 50

A bit later than usual, but here’s the Magento news until the 14th of December. The Magento 2 developer beta is closer than ever, MageUnconference its future still isn’t certain and Magento Connect receiving heavy criticism: more after the jump.

Magento

• Fabrizio wrote a step-to-step guide on how to update a Magento installation and improve the Magento installation its environment in the process.
• Recently, Magento CE 1.9.1.0 got released. Now, the sample data has also been updated so demo shops have a much better visualization of all the new features available.
• Encompassing 317MB of disk space, Vinai put together a few shell scripts to put that down to a minimum of 19MB. Pre-compiled packages of heavily compressed sample data are also available.
• Data regarding Magento certifications can now be browsed through by month.
• More certification stats: Alex Levashov has compiled an infographic on the Magento talent in Melbourne, Australia.
• Catalin Ciobanu released an extension which improves Magento’s layered navigation with SEO’d URLs and AJAX-based navigation.
• n98-magerun got updated to version 1.93.0. Lots of new commands and miscellaneous improvements.
• Magicento got updated to version 2.9.0. New features include more functions viable to auto complete and code generation for admin grids and forms.
• SSE_AclReload adds a menu-entry to the backend for easily cleaning the ACL cache.
• Webgriffe_Config allows to define configuration values in XML files which will have priority over configuration values in the database.
• The “Product Types Demystified” presentation by Fabrizio gives a clear explanation of Magento its various product types.
• Due to bad sound quality, the video of Tim’s “The Disgusting Truth of Magento Enterprise” talk is now dubbed.
• Wigman_AjaxSwatches adds AJAX-based navigation to the new color swatches. According to the write-up, it reduces page load time drastically.
• Lots of articles on the Webguys Advent Calendar. Take for example “A possible solution for Dropshipping in Magento” or a guide on working with Magento integrations. Worth looking into.

Magento 2

• Alan wrote about the upcoming, planned release cycles of Magento 2, discussed the various caching implementations which are available in Magento 2 and wrote about the various channels which can be used to give feedback on Magento 2.
• Another post of Alan, “Which framework would you put under Magento 2?“, sparkled a bit of discussion and gives good insight regarding the public opinion on sticking with Zend Framework 1.
• 0.1.0-alpha108 and 0.1.0-alpha109 are the last two commits before the developer beta kicks off. Here are the headlights:
  • The setup tool its dependencies are flattened out and merged with the Magento application.
  • All methods annotated with a [cci]@deprecated[/cci] comment have been removed. Obsolete code has also been removed.
  • Over 200 (!) miscellaneous bugfixes.
  • The repository now contains a sample nginx configuration file.
  • All license notices in files have been removed. What’s left is a mini-copyright notice. It still has a year in it, so the annual diff with all files changed isn’t going away.
  • Don’t forget to check the changelog if you want the full story.
• BelVG wrote a user-guide on how to create a simple product and one on how to deal with advanced price rules.
• Inchoo wrote about the basics of dependency injection and its usage in Magento 2.

Community

• Don’t forget to get your MageUnconference ticket. If the financial goals aren’t met at the end of this year, the event will simply be cancelled.
• “Magento Connect is a fraud” is what Karen from WebShopApps has to say about her experience with the platform. A lot of enraged and disappointing tweets on the WSA account have been deleted since. Keywords like “copyright infringement” and “will sue” should give you an idea of where this is headed.
• Tim Bezhashvyly has stepped down as moderator on Magento SE. Marius will take his place.
• Tim is also parting hands with MageKarma and passes the project fully on to Marius.
• “The Magento Facts” is a humorous thread on Magento SE with inside jokes regarding Magento.
• After downloading all extensions on Magento Connect, Allan MacGregor launched Triplecheck.io. It indexes Magento Connect extensions based on an average of various code inspection tools.

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