Magento DevBlog - Page 3

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.

Use our new magento/composer-root-update-plugin to update the root composer.json file during Magento upgrades!

To provide a better user experience for our merchant documentation, we are replacing our edition-specific (Open Source, Commerce, Commerce for B2B) guides with a single, unified guide.

As we get closer to M1 End of Life (EOL) on June 30, 2020, we’d like to give our extension developers and Tech Partners some extension specific information to prepare for the changes.

You may know, the Zend Framework has a new path of development as the Laminas project. What does this mean in terms of Magento infrastructure? 

This is the first major release, which is dedicated to improving the Magento developer experience and embedding the development process in the popular PHPStorm IDE. Existing functionality was revisited and missing pieces were implemented to complete features.

Magento standards were taken seriously so that developers won’t see any failures during code review and submission to the Magento Marketplace. Developers don’t need to spend additional time reading and learning small details about Magento development. Your IDE will help with this by suggesting the correct way of doing it. The Magento PHPStorm Plugin includes a lot of shortcuts addressed to Magento Functional Testing, Require JS mapping, GraphQL, Plugin declaration inspection, code generation, and much more.

We are announcing that a structure of packages.json file will be changed on https://repo.magento.com and will be released on 5/26/2020.

At Magento, we feel happy and privileged to have a community so supremely dedicated to growing merchant experiences. Since launching our new Marketplace, within a few short years we are well past the 5,000 extension mark. However, it gives us a unique challenge because a lot of those extensions, for various reasons, are abandoned or cannot be supported well enough to be reasonably current. 

Due to the Payment Service Directive PSD2 (see details on Magento devdocs) and the continued evolution of many APIs, a number of Magento core payment integrations risk becoming outdated and no longer security compliant in the future. To that end, many core payment integrations have been or will soon be deprecated and we are recommending a transition to their corresponding marketplace extensions.

Magento 2.4 became a perfect opportunity to proceed with backwards-incompatible changes that were waiting for years. When I was speaking at Magento Conferences about replacing inheritance with composition, I was not aware that I was going to be a part of this history. One such change was this Pull Request and its followup introduced by Vinai Kopp. Althought this change was very expected, these PRs were not merged.

At the begining of 2020 Vinai encouraged me to continue the work on Controllers decomposition using his contribution. With his continuous support and tremendous work of Lena Orobei - together we finally delivered one of the biggest architectural changes towards decomposition of Controllers.

The Docs team is constantly maintaining and improving the infrastructure and usability of our documentation sites to improve your user experience!

Thanks to the collaboration between comwrap GmbH, Balance Internet and the Magento Community Engineering team, Asynchronous / Bulk API functionality was first delivered in Magento 2.3.0 as a new API that makes possible the execution of operations asynchronously using RabbitMQ (which is delivered out of the box with Magento since version 2.3.0 as well). Details and history of Asynchronous / Bulk API are described in a previous DevBlog post by Oleksandr Lyzun. In short: a user sends the same synchronous request but in response only receives a bulk_uuid. This request goes into the RabbitMQ queue and consumers in Magento process them in order. Using this bulk_uuid, users can monitor the request processing. One big benefit of bulk operations is that users can send different operations using only one request (e.g. create or update list of products).

2019 was a fantastic year for contributions and community involvement. During the year our contributors created over 8,000 pull requests across Magento GitHub repositories! Even more exciting is that over 8,500 were processed, meaning we made a significant dent in the backlog! We would like to extend a big thank you to all our contributors, maintainers and partners that did awesome work constantly iterating on Magento projects. We want to take some time and make some space in this post to look back at 2019 and highlight the amazing achievements of the community.