Magento DevBlog - Page 2

We kicked off the Magento Open Source Community Prioritization Process last month. As part of this initiative, we have had community members use their influence to vote up certain pull requests they want to see incorporated into the Magento Open Source code base.  

I woke up this morning and wondered how the progress on community pull requests is going.  Yes, we implemented a process and asked the community to vote on the pull requests that they are most interested in merging, but now what? 

Remember when I talked about kicking off the Magento Open Source Community Prioritization Process?  The goals of this process were to make sure we were prioritizing the most important needs of the community and increase velocity of these changes into the code base.  We also wanted to create a transparent communication channel so we could all see the progress being made.

Last Thursday marked the most recent Magento Association board meeting.  As always, we manage to pull everyone together across the globe for a fulfilling conversation of topics that always runs over the allotted time. 

What did you do on Thursday, October 27?  I hope part of it was spent listening to the Magento Association Town Hall.  If you didn’t get a chance to be a part of the virtual Town Hall, read below for my take on it. 

It’s finally here! We are ready to kick off the Magento Open Source community prioritization process.  I recently spoke about this in an announcement at Meet Magento NYC in September.  The goal of this community prioritization is to ensure that the Magento Open Source community has a say in what are the right items that should be incorporated into the code base. 

Last Thursday, we had our most recent Magento Association board meeting. We had a great showing of all the directors spanning the globe. It is always tough to find a suitable time across the globe to meet.

After a break for 3 years, Meet Magento NYC happened in person, and with full zeal in New York City on September 23. It was a reunion of sorts as people could finally network in person again.  It was my first Meet Magento event and New York was a great venue that embodied the spirit of the community. With almost 500 attendees, there was broad representation, with some attendees flying many hours to attend the event. I was so happy to meet so many of our community partners, developers and sponsors in person! 

Starting with Adobe Commerce 2.4.5 we introduced parameterized data fixture and utilized PHP native attributes for integration and API test frameworks (more information in this documentation section). In this article we will highlight some new features and how to use them in order to create clean and well organized test coverage without the need of duplicating existing fixtures.

This is a continuation of the article How to Use and Create Data Fixture in Integration and API Functional Tests (Part 1/2) 

Starting with Adobe Commerce 2.4.5 we introduced parameterized data fixture and utilized PHP native attributes for integration and api test frameworks (more information in this documentation section). In this article we will highlight some new features and how to use them in order to create clean and well organized test coverage without the need of duplicating existing fixtures.

We would like to inform you of a change to the planned release schedule for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source 2.4.4. To help ensure this release delivers the highest standards of security and quality, the pre-release period for Adobe Commerce customers is now planned to begin on March 29, two weeks prior to the general availability date of April 12 for both Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source. While we strive to publish updates on our planned release dates, we shift these dates when we feel it is in the best interest of our merchants. 

We also want to remind all merchants of the latest security updates available here. If you are on an impacted version, we strongly recommend that you apply these hotfixes immediately. It is also recommended that you plan to upgrade as soon as version 2.4.4 is available. 

Best regards, 

The Adobe Commerce Team 

Earlier this month, we held our first Adobe Developers Live: Commerce event of the year. The event featured sessions by our product and engineering teams, with topics ranging from maintaining and upgrading the platform to exciting innovations in developer tooling, APIs, and services that enable merchants to deliver amazing shopping experiences. If you were unable to attend the event live, the content is available on-demand on Experience League. 

As a developer for Adobe Commerce or Magento Open Source, you may already be aware of the Magento plugin for PHP Storm — currently one of the most popular PHP IDEs. We’re excited to announce that the Adobe Commerce Upgrade Compatibility Tool is now integrated with the plugin, which will make your future upgrades much easier and faster to analyse.

Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source to resolve vulnerabilities rated as critical. Latest details are available in the security bulletin and release notes. 

Adobe Commerce Support produces a lot of quality patches by customer requests. Usually, these patches are also backported to previous releases, but they were not publicly available prior to the release of the Quality Patches Tool. The Quality Patches Tool is designed to deliver patches created by Adobe for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source customers, with the package easily installed via Composer.

Addressing the Apache Log4j2 Vulnerability in Adobe Commerce 

As part of our ongoing integration into Adobe Experience Cloud and building on the refresh of the Partner Portal and Partner Directory earlier this year, the marketing pages on Magento.com are migrating to business.adobe.com. Starting today, visitors to magento.com looking for Adobe Commerce or Magento Open Source content will be redirected to business.adobe.com.

As a part of the integration with the Adobe developer ecosystem, we moved the Magento Community Portal content to the Adobe Developer Website so that a broader audience can access it. 

The new Magento Open Source site is developer.adobe.com/open/magento.  

Adobe Commerce would not be so successful without our beloved open-source community. We are looking for the best way to highlight and celebrate outside contributions to our open-source projects. That’s why we are excited to announce that we created dashboards for  top contributors and partners using Bitergia analytics. 

As announced on September 16th 2021, we will be taking big steps towards simplifying our release process and decreasing the total cost of ownership for our Merchants in 2022. Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 will be released on March 8, 2022,  be powered by PHP 8.1, and will include  several key framework upgrades. To best prepare our Merchants and help them reap all the benefits that 2.4.4 will offer, we’re providing a look into all the platform updates included in the upcoming release. Start planning your upgrade today to keep your stores secure, performant, and reliable.

2.4.4 beta program will include 4 monthly beta releases, starting October 18th, you will be able to prepare your technology and merchants 5 months before 2.4.4 GA.

At Adobe, we’re always striving to keep our Merchants’ eCommerce stores secure, performant and reliable by helping them stay up-to-date with the latest versions of Adobe Commerce. Just as if you were taking care of a physical store, an eCommerce store requires maintenance to make sure you are providing the best experience for your customers, but we are aware of the potential challenges that are associated with the upgrade process as well as the recurrent investment required.  

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.