Getting Ready for Magento 2.4 release

[filip_maj1]

Contributions to Magento Open Source or Magento Commerce are a powerful and effective way to strengthen the wider Magento community. Magento community involvement leads to the continuous improvement of the Magento framework; keeping it up to date with the latest development tools and best practices. We are grateful to all who participate in community projects to expand platform features and support the global community who use Magento.

Community-developed code is a significant part of the Magento platform, including numerous features, improvements to the framework and hundreds of bug fixes. We believe that Magento teams and community contributors working together create an incredible team of professionals and eCommerce experts that deliver the best eCommerce platform on the market.

We would like to make sure that our focuses are aligned and moving all of us to success. Currently, the Magento team is focused on delivering a new minor release to the market. We are planning to deliver the Magento 2.4.0 release in 2020 with a set of great new features, improvements, component updates and great product stability.

We would like to announce that we are opening the 2.4-develop branch in the Magento2 project repository to provide access to the entire Magento Community. Your feedback and contributions are critical in shaping the future of Magento.

All existing community pull requests will be redirected to the new branch and will be delivered to the market within scope of the 2.4.x releases.

Over the last several months, a team of the best performance engineers have been working hard on Magento GraphQL performance improvements. Today, we are happy to announce that we are ready to share our R&D results and deliver a more highly-performant GraphQL storefront to the community. In addition, we are introducing the new concept of the Storefront API to the platform. In early 2020, we are going to open these code repositories to the Magento community so that you can join these community projects! We are wrapping up preparations on infrastructure and tooling to support these projects so stay tuned for updates from the Magento team!

We are planning a series of public workshops to share new concepts with all of you. Please join us on our Community Hangout to learn more and to share your feedback.

Considering our focus on the 2.4.0 release and the introduction of new concepts to the platform, we will stop accepting contributions to the graphql-ce GitHub repository and will archive it. We will create a new GitHub repository shortly and we would like to invite all of you to join us in collaborating on a performant and efficient GraphQL storefront. Please keep following us on Twitter for the latest updates.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all community contributors of the Magento 2.3 GraphQL project! All of you did an incredible job introducing GraphQL to Magento. The community contributed 80% of GraphQL coverage: 298 PRs were created and 261 PRs were merged in 2019!

Special thanks to our honored GraphQL Top Contributors:

 Yaroslav is an honored Magento Community Maintainer and contributed lots of great features to the project: retrieving shopping cart information, adding virtual products to a cart, shipping methods support, placing orders, customizable product options support and resolving issues.

Patrick McLain Patrick is our pro GraphQL developer and community maintainer, who implemented setting payment method on cart, adding bundle and configurable products to cart, store payment methods, retrieving country and currency information, significant contributions to test coverage and test framework improvement.

 Vitaliy implemented setting billing address on cart, checkout agreements, retrieving a list of available payment methods, store configuration, and testing framework improvements. 

Ievgenii Gryshkun

 Ievgenii is our bug fixing and test coverage king, always pushing quality of the project higher. They are a regular contributor and presenter and we really appreciate how active and involved they are!

 Alexander is our DevDocs specialist (many thanks for the awesome tutorial) who also implemented adding downloadable products to a cart and instantly working on test coverage and code cleanup. 

Pablo Fantini  Pablo introduced customer address management and address books support. 

Many thanks to our partners who dedicated their best developers to this project: 

We would not be able to have achieved this without the help of our contributors and partners. Working with them has been a pleasure and we cannot say enough good things about working with them! Your professionalism, collaborative spirit and passion is what has brought us to where we are today. Thank you!