We are greateful for the incredible contributions being submitted by the Magento community around the world. Magento accepts hundreds of pull requests every month. In March alone, we processed more than 100 pull requests. You can see real-time updates to the contribution activity statistics here: https://magento.com/magento-contributors
Equally important are contributions that provide new features. Today, I’d like to walk you through one example – Magento Admin Store Configuration Search. This feature, long awaited by Magento merchants and admin users, provides the ability to search through all Store configuration settings in order to make necessary adjustments during the launch of a new store or when introducing new features.
As an admin user, you may have encountered situations when you know that you want to disable the money order payment method or enable a security key for the store, but you have no idea where to look for the needed configuration section. Although you can search through the Magento user guides or on DevDocs for this information, this requires additional hops between resources.
Another option has been to use the Admin search capabilities. However, this only searches through the business data. That’s why back in 2015 Max Gubar from the Liip company came up with a Magento 1 extension that allowed you to search the admin store configuration. It became very popular, and once Magento 2 was released, we immediately received requests to add the same functionality. Our User Experience team created design requirements for the feature, and we contacted Max about contributing his extension to the Magento 2 platform.
We have made the process of accepting new functionality smooth and straightforward for the contributor. First, the feature is approved by the Magento product owner to ensure that it is aligned with the general direction of the Magento platform. In this case, it was a no-brainer since the feature was in the backlog already.
We had a couple of conversations with Max on the architectural design he outlined for the feature. Due to his deep experience with the Magento core, there were not many changes to the initial proposal. The UX team provided requirements for the visual design. Because the admin configuration search is a relatively big set of code changes, it went through (and passed) multiple rounds of code review after it was submitted to GitHub. Max wrote both unit and integration tests for the functionality and the feature was included in the regression cycle for the next Magento release. The final step for all contributions is a security check, which ensures that the feature does not introduce any security vulnerabilities.
You can see the pull request at https://github.com/magento/magento2/pull/10335. You can read about the experience from Max’s perspective at https://blog.liip.ch/archive/2017/09/29/magento-2-config-search.html
The feature will be included in the Magento 2.3 release.
Please join me in congratulating the great work by Max Gubar, with the support of the Liip team, in making the platform more user-friendly.
Max Gubar is Magento 2 developer and Architect. He is part of Liip, an agile company from Switzerland with a long history of working with the Magento 2.
More contributions are coming to Magento. As a part of the initiative to build features together with the Community, we open to new ideas. If you would like to join such efforts as a partner or individual contributor, you can propose an idea or join in the design and development of features proposed by other community members or the Magento core team. Please write to the community engineering team at engcom@magento.com, and I will work with you personally on these activities.
