Magento DevBlog - Page 2

Author: John Stockton, Senior Director, Product. 

The power of open source software is how it enables a global community of developers to build upon and extend the core code to address a wide range of business needs and use cases. The Magento community has always been a key source of innovation, not just for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source, but throughout the ecommerce industry - pioneering solutions, rapidly advancing product capabilities, and enabling companies from diverse industries to achieve their customer experience visions. Over the 14 years since Magento was first released, the platform’s flexibility has enabled the largest ecosystem in all of commerce to execute on every imaginable digital business case and empowered customers, partners, and developers to succeed.

Adobe’s Developer Experience team has been committed to our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion goals for the Magento community this year, building on the work that we did in previous years with Jill Binder from Diverse In Tech.

We began holding a training in 2020 to teach you how to hold the Speaker Workshops for your own communities. Despite the difficulties with events over the pandemic, the Hold Your Own Magento Speaker Diversity Workshop was a success. We have seen some people start doing this in their communities right away.

Now we are looking for another group of people who want to learn how to hold this workshop in your own culture, language, time zone, etc.

We are excited to announce that Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source versions 2.4.3, along with security-only versions 2.4.2-p2 and 2.3.7-p1, are now generally available. These release packages are available via composer at repo.magento.com and via account.magento.com. You must use the primary MageID associated with the Adobe Commerce account to access these downloads. For help with access, see our Help Center.

We are excited to announce that Page Builder, our visual drag & drop content editor, will be available for Magento Open Source users as well as Adobe Commerce users with the 2.4.3 release. This change provides a unified native CMS tool across our platforms which will enable the Magento Community to develop extensions utilizing Page Builder in order to deliver value for the entire ecosystem.

We are looking forward to connecting with you on October 4-5 at our third Adobe Developers Live event!

At this event, we will be setting aside time for you to bring key developer topics to discuss in a virtual roundtable with your peers and Adobe SMEs. We call this DevExchange.

Community contributions play an important role in ensuring the platform remains modern, secure, and stable. In the most recent release, the community contributed fixes to resolve over 300 GitHub issues. Currently, when contributions by the community are accepted, they are included in the next patch release. In addition, fixes are only accepted to the latest release line. Merchants and systems integrators needing to apply critical fixes have to wait for the next release or build and manage patches themselves.  

While working on the PHP 8 Compatibility Community Project, we noticed interest in not only updating libraries to PHP 8 compatible versions, but also in updating all other dependencies to the latest versions. We think that's a great idea! The newest versions of libraries not only brings bugfixes and security improvements to the framework, but also allows Magento developers to take advantage of the latest functionality. We are grateful to the contributors who are paying attention to that direction and have already proposed a number of updates via GitHub issues and pull requests. 

To gather all these community efforts together, prioritize them, and speed up delivery to the mainline code we are launching the Platform Health Community Project! 

We have completed upgrading Magento external dependencies in the scope of the PHP 8 Compatibility project. These changes will be available in the 2.4.3 release. We are still working to update internal dependencies to provide full PHP 8.0 compatibility. Also, based on our experience we have decided to eliminate some of the least active dependencies so that we can accelerate efforts to make Magento compatible with new PHP versions in the future; particularly for PHP 8.1.

We are excited to announce the release of Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source – 2.3.7 and 2.4.2-p1. With important updates to security, we strongly recommend that you take advantage and upgrade as soon as possible to ensure your sites remain secure, compliant, and optimized for the highest level of performance.

Magento Commerce Champions is a new and expanded program for top Magento community contributors. It builds and extends on the success of the Magento Masters and is open to anyone who is active in the community, creates a positive environment, and consistently adds value to the community.

This program will allow us to better engage local commerce leaders and address the connected-but-disjointed world we currently live in, while making more space for diversity and inclusion.

Spring is in full swing and Adobe is continuing to grow our Magento community towards our shared goal of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Though this year has seen many people face different and difficult challenges, we are thankful to everyone for being dedicated to supporting diversity across our broad Magento community.

We are bringing back the popular Magento Community Speaker Workshop on May 20 and 27, 2021 so that everyone across the global Magento community, no matter your current experience in public speaking, can own your expertise and generate Magento-related topics on which to give a talk.

We are excited to announce the release of Magento Commerce and Open Source 2.4.2, along with security-only patches 2.3.6-p1 and 2.4.1-p1.

Welcome to the February 2021 Magento Developer Community Update. Each month we bring you up to speed with what's been happening with Magento and its community as well as upcoming events, hangouts, releases, and more.

While we have already received multiple pull requests for the Magento PHP 8 Compatibility community project, what benefits or features will PHP 8 actually provide? 

Apart from the performance improvements, which have yet to be measured for Magento 2, there are a number of cool features that may introduce significant changes to Magento development. 

This blog post outlines our plans for migrating to PHP 8.

The power of prevention is increasingly present in our everyday life, and it can now be applied to your Magento Commerce Cloud site.

The year 2020 was a very unusual and challenging year for all of us. This year undoubtedly changed community life and forced us to cope and adjust. 

The Magento Community did a fantastic job in such difficult circumstances. Meetups, conferences, and contribution days have been held online making them even more accessible for everyone around the globe. Remote collaboration has never been so active!

In Magento 2.5 we are marking an additional 1000+ classes and interfaces as @api to increase the officially recognized API coverage for third-party extension and local customizations. 

Since 2015, Split Database functionality has been offered within Magento Commerce as a tool that merchants can take advantage of to improve performance. Thanks to enhancements over the last few years to the Magento platform, merchants are now able to match Split Database performance via a single database method. For this reason, we're excited to announce that in the coming release of Magento 2.4.2, we will begin the process of deprecating Split Database.  

To ensure that our journey to PHP 8 compatibility is visible and transparent, we are launching the Magento PHP 8 Compatibility Community Project!

Following up on the blog post from our maintainer Ihor Sviziev, that was a first step towards our goal to have a cleaner and well-maintained backlog. The Stale Bot GitHub application is already monitoring and handling the issues that have been inactive for a long period of time in the Magento 2 repository. 

Contribution Highlights  

Summer is the time of vacations, spending more time outside, enjoying the sun, weather and nature. This time of the year brings renewed energy and inspiration to everybody, including the Magento Community! We would like to say a huge thank you to every contributor for delivering their much-appreciated improvements to the framework! Here are the highlights for the most active Magento contribution partners during the last quarter. 

1st place: Atwix  

Points: 6092 | PRs accepted: 102 | PRs reviewed: 260 

A continued leader, Atwix is an e-commerce agency focusing on B2C and B2B end-to-end implementations, assisting in strategic planning, design, website development, and post-launch maintenance. Atwix is a long-time Magento Solution Partner and one of the first Magento 2 Trained Partners in the world, with offices in Austria, Slovakia, USA, and Ukraine. Atwix’s team of seasoned and committed professionals helps its clients achieve top results in every aspect of their online businesses.  

• With all the experience of continuous community contributions leadership, Atwix’s team reviewed and approved 260 pull requests; ensuring high-quality delivery. 
• Special thank you to Vitaliy Boyko and the Magento PHPStorm Plugin project team for their dedicated work towards improving the Magento development experience. 
• Atwix continues to play a significant role in the GraphQL project, which includes both designing its architectural and extending its coverage.  
• Finally, the team also keeps the documentation up to date with continuous contributions to the Magento DevDocs project.

2nd  place: Vaimo  

Points: 1771 | PRs accepted: 31 | PRs reviewed: 90  

Vaimo is one of the world’s most respected experts in digital commerce on the Magento and Adobe Commerce Cloud platforms. As a full-service omnichannel agency, they deliver strategy, design, development, and managed services to brands, retailers, and manufacturers all over the world. Their sharp focus, broad experience, and deep expertise within B2B, B2C, PIM, Order Management, and ERP integrations make them a key partner for driving success in digital commerce.  

• Vaimo’s team have applied their expertise to review and approve 90 community pull requests. 
• Vaimo’s team tripled their community contributions last quarter and is now the 2nd most active contributor to Magento! 
• Vaimo is a leader of contributions to the Magento DevDocs project last quarter! We are grateful for these efforts to make the development and work with Magento even more clear and simple. 

3rd  place:  Blue Acorn iCi  

Points: 931 | PRs accepted: 21 | PRs reviewed: 65  

Blue AcorniCi is the digital consumer experience company pioneering the convergence of analytics, ecommerce, content management, and full-service commerce offerings. The company uses integrated capabilities and the unparalleled expertise of their engineers, data scientists, and retail experts to expand and accelerate  the  business for each of their customers.  

• 65 PRs were reviewed and approved by maintainers from Blue Acorn iCi.   
• Blue Acorn iCi is leading this quarter on the delivered solutions for the highest priority issues! 

4th place:  comwrap GmbH 

Points: 734 | PRs accepted: 21 | PRs reviewed: 23  

With best-of-breed strategy in marketing and technology, comwrap relies on proven market-leading software ecosystems and implements customers' requirements, based on best practices and utilizing integration building blocks and blueprints. 

• comwrap’s team delivered 21 pull requests and reviewed and approved 23 pull requests in the past quarter. 
• The team also made a valuable contribution to the Magento DevDocs project! 

5th  place:  Krish TechnoLabs 

Points: 469 | PRs accepted: 1 | Issues verified: 108 

Established in 2003, Krish TechnoLabs is the leading digital commerce agency that excels in working with clients to create successful and profitable B2C and B2B based digital commerce solutions. 

Krish TechnoLabs team is a leader of QA contribution with the 108 issues assessed during the past quarter. This activity is the very beginning of the contribution process and is essential to further work on our community backlogs with confidence and accuracy. 

Join our  Partner  Contribution  Program ! 

Every active Solution Partner and Tech Partner that is willing to collaborate is eligible to join our Partner Contribution Rewards Program. Contact engcom@adobe.com and we will happily guide you through the onboarding process!  

To connect with the Magento Community, join us on the Magento Community Engineering Slack. If you are interested in joining Slack, or a specific channel, send us request at engcom@adobe.com or sign up yourself.  

We are excited to announce the release of the latest versions of Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source: 2.4.1, 2.3.6, and 2.4.0-p1. With important updates to security and performance, we strongly recommend that you take advantage and upgrade as soon as possible to ensure your sites remain secure, compliant, and optimized for the highest level of performance ahead of this holiday season. 

We are constantly working to enhance and scale the open source contribution experience. This post explains one of our upcoming initiatives, the implementation of a the "Stale Bot" to automatically touch and then close stale issues, with the option for our community to re-open those issues.

We are extending security support for the Magento 2.3.x release line for an additional three months (through April 2022). Considering that support for PHP 7.3 ends in December 2021, we will be introducing PHP 7.4 compatibility to the release of Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source 2.3.7 in May 2021.

We are unveiling a new process to fast-track Marketplace extensions using our new open-source tool, the Magento Semantic Versioning Checker (SVC).  Check the article for details on installation and use of SVC.

Magento 2.4 is now available with important tech stack updates, enhanced security, and new features including functional and performance updates for the Magento Inventory project. Read on to learn more.

By Maksym Novik and Oleksandr Kravchuk

Starting with Magento 2.3, the inventory features of Magento increased dramatically thanks to the community-led Multi-source inventory project and its successor, Magento Inventory. Magento 2.4 includes the latest inventory features as well as some important performance updates which optimize and supercharge inventory operations. This article takes a look at the performance evolution of the inventory project.

By Oleksandr Kravchuk and Maksym Novik

With the second quarter of 2020 completed, it’s time to review contribution results and achievements by each of the Solution Partner teams participating in the Magento Partners Contribution Reward Program. 

Our top contributors are tracked through the Magento Contributors site year-round, and you can see the leader-board for our contributing Magento Partners for 2020.

Magento 2.4.0 comes with a major upgrade of the PHPUnit framework, which is used for all types of tests: Static, Unit, Integration, API Functional, and the Magento Functional Testing Framework. Magento Architects decided to make an upgrade to the latest PHPUnit version, which is 9.1.

Please be aware that the upgrade of PHPUnit is backwards incompatible.

In Magento 2.4.0, we will be removing support for three deprecated catalog search engines: MySQL and Elasticsearch 2.x, 5.x, and 6.x. Merchants must install and configure a supported version of Elasticsearch before they upgrade to Magento 2.4. New installations require a connection to Elasticsearch to complete.