Magento DevBlog - Page 8

They say, “Feedback is a gift,” and the Magento Marketplace Product team agrees. They started hearing from developers in the Magento community that process flow and usability concerns were keeping them from submitting extensions to Magento Marketplace. The mission of Marketplace is to provide Magento merchants access to authentic, high-quality extensions and themes to enhance their ecommerce sites, so this issue had to be addressed head on.

We are encouraged to see how strongly this year has started off. There have been a lot of great pull requests, project contributions, and interesting conversations taking place in our community engineering Slack channel. If we continue this throughout the year, 2018 will be an amazing year for all of us.

Magento Open Source - Statistics

During the month of January, we have processed 191 pull requests. With the help of our amazing community maintainers team, there have been 203 pull requests created by the community, 88 unique contributions and 48 new contributors. These stats highlight to us that people are continuing to contribute, and new people are getting involved. It also highlights the importance of our community maintainers team, as together they processed 80 pull requests.

For the month of January our top 5 individual contributors have been:

#	Contributor	Created	Accepted
1	Aki Ojalehto	25	7
2	Danny Verkade - Cream	18	18
3	Ihor Sviziev	13	7
4	Alexander Shkurko	9	7
5	Vinay Shah	7	1

And the top 5 partner contributors have been:

All contributor stats are now available on the Magento Contributors website.

Contribution Events

We would like to highlight a few contribution events from January that we think really carried the spirit of open source contribution.

Meet Magento India

During the Meet Magento conference in India, Wagento hosted a contribution day. During this event, we had 45 developers from around India and provided 22 pull requests.

We asked attendee Neeta Kangiya to give us her thoughts on the event and contribution in general.

"There are moments when you make exactly the right shot in a round of golf or a tennis match, and you realize with immense pleasure what you've just accomplished. For me, working with "Magento Community Engineering Team" was the same, and I got this opportunity on Magento Contribution Day 2018 which was held on 7 January 2018 during #MMIN18 and took place in my beautiful city Ahmedabad. It provided intensive workshops with the #magento core engineering team, giving great insights into Magento 2 development and improvement to the Magento 2 core. Working with very down to earth Magento masters Vinai Koop, David Manners and Eugene Shakhsuvarov was already a great achievement.

Happiest to be among one of the @Magento contributors in #MMIN18 as I have generated 1 PR and contributed into "devdocs" also, and I was amazed when my PR was approved. What else does someone need as their work will be appreciated at the end of the day and I also got T-shirt printed with "Contributor - Magento Community Engineering."

This contribution was not limited to that day only. Currently also in my free time, I am continuing to contribute for the Magento 2 community." - Neeta Kangiya

Contribution Day in Kharkiv

On the 27th of January, Magecom hosted a contribution day in Kharkiv Ukraine. Focusing on the Multi Source Inventory (MSI) project, this event provided 6 pull requests and introduced a lot more developers to the project. You can find a video highlights package of the event here, but we also asked Sergey Fisenko, the CEO of Magecom, for his thoughts on this event.

"For many years, our engineers have been visiting Magento events around the world, and it helped our company improve, grow, and eventually become one of the biggest Magento-focused agencies in Ukraine. We felt it's now our turn to contribute to the community, and we decided to organize a series of Magento meetups in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and help other developers grow professionally. Thanks, Magento!" - Sergey Fisenko

How to get involved

As always, if you are interested in finding out more about contributing to Magento we recommend getting involved in the community engineering Slack channel (email requests to join to engcom@magento.com). We also have a wide selection of projects currently running. If you are interested in participating in one of these projects take a look at the project overview page and let us know.

At Magento, security is a primary concern for us. As part of our commitment to enhancing security we will be requiring all Magento partners who contribute code to Magento on GitHub to have Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) enabled on their accounts.

The Community Engineering team aims to facilitate frequent two-way communication between Magento and the community. With this in mind, it gives us great pleasure to announce a new initiative, Community Engineering Hangouts.

As we move into 2018, it is important to take a few moments to look back at how far we, as a community, have come in 2017. For this update, we would like to share with you the yearly statistics and some choice memories of the year.

The 2017 year is almost over, and it's time to look back and assess the results of the Q4 Magento Partners Contribution Reward Program. 

In my first post about Community Collaboration in Magento, I touched on the community’s tireless bug-squashing and gave an overview of how the Magento Community Team processes pull requests (PRs). In this post, I will dig a little deeper into how you, as members of the community, can contribute. I will also go behind the scenes of the Magento 2 repository.

November 2017 was an exciting mix of contribution days, community project work, and of course pull request processing. Coming off the back of the #SQUASHTOBERFEST event, the core team and maintainers had their work cut out with the amount of open pull requests the community has provided. This month saw a record level of processed pull requests as well as a fantastic level of new contributors.

The Instant Purchase module contribution by Creatuity is an excellent example of community initiative. Creatuity took risks on their own and implemented the whole module from scratch without being certain whether it would be accepted to core.

This module allows all merchants on the Magento 2 platform to offer a streamlined, single touch process by which customers can make purchases. This feature utilizes the Braintree vaulted credit card method that’s native to Magento 2, allowing logged-in users to place an order with a single touch that’s billed and shipped to the default information already stored on their account.

Keeping in line with our efforts to improve the quality of all extensions on Marketplace, as of 1/2/18 we will be implementing Varnish cache validation during Technical Review for all M2 submissions.The Varnish test verifies products do not break Varnish caching when in production mode. 

October 2017 was the debut of our #SQUASHTOBERFEST event, focusing on prioritizing issues in Magento Commerce and Open Source 2.2 to be squashed by the community. We had high expectations for this event, and the community did not let us down. We had the largest number of pull requests in a month ever.  As a token of our thanks, any contributor with two or more submitted pull requests over this event will receive a limited edition Magento t-shirt.

Magento 2.2 brings increased @api annotation coverage. It will improve the communication of breaking changes in the platform and will make upgrades easier.

Enterprise companies need to leverage the power of a strong CMS with a best-in class ecommerce system, but for too long, none of the existing platforms on the market provided both. Drupal's ecommerce options have historically been limited, and Magento’s primary concern is more with commerce than content. Combine the two, and you've got a best in class use case for each system.

Here are five lessons Third & Grove learned when doing this type of integration.

In the effort of continuous improvement, the Marketplace Team is proud to announce the implementation of a new submission path for patch releases.

September 2017 became a record setting month for Community Engineering.

Here are the leading Solution Partner contributors for the first round

With Black Friday approaching, ecommerce retailers will be competing to attract mobile shoppers. For most retailers, however, this presents a challenge, as mobile traffic is rising but conversions lag behind. And the main culprit for poor performance is slow-to-load pages. As the Aberdeen Group points out, for every one-second delay it takes a page to load, the result is a 7-percent loss in conversions. To address this problem, Google launched Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which delivers a consistently fast experience to handheld devices.

Magento Community Engineering team is working together with Magento Community starting February 2017. It has been busy seven months for all of us, and together, we achieved great results.

Magento is becoming a Progressive Web Application platform. That is to say, we at Magento are making a suite of tools for building online stores as Progressive Web Applications. These tools will help developers learn PWA techniques, build lightning-fast PWA frontends, and create PWA components and extensions for reuse or sale on the Magento Marketplace. Taken together, we’re tentatively calling this suite of tools the Magento PWA Studio.

This blog post is a summary of changes coming in 2.2 related to deployment. Improvements include:

• The removal of static asset generation dependence on the database (so it can be run on a Jenkins or similar server),
• Performance improvements for compilation and static asset generation (much of which has already been backported to 2.1.x patches), and
• Better per environment vs. shared configuration support.

This blog post summarizes current thoughts on the proposed Magento persistence layer for Magento 2. This work is currently not assigned to be completed by a specific release. This blog is part of a series sharing internal thinking as we progress to gain community feedback as we proceed.

Start selling on Marketplace! Magento Connect to close September 15.

Contributions to the Magento Open Source or Magento Commerce is the best way to give back to the Magento community, it helps to have constant improvement of the framework, keep it up to date with the development tools, best practices. To recognize the efforts, Magento is putting in place a program that will track and allow rewarding Magento Solution Partners for their contributions. Magento will keep track of every pull request which comes from the partner and partners with the best track record of contributions will be specifically promoted by Magento and have a variety of benefits available through the Magento Solution Partner Program. This will provide better visibility on the partners’ landscape in the community and access to the promotion during Magento events.

The Magento 2.2 launch is quickly approaching and that means that Magento Marketplace’s Extension Quality Program (EQP) will soon start accepting extensions and themes compatible with Magento 2.2, even before the product officially launches. 

GraphQL is an API style that Facebook has released as open source that is getting traction on other projects, including GitHub. This blog post explores reasons why GraphQL could be interesting for Magento 2 to add alongside REST and SOAP as web API protocols.

Magento uses the EAV (Entity Attribute Value) model so that Administrators can dynamically add attributes to entities such as “Product” and “Customer. This blog post provides a quick overview of the EAV model as a precursor to future blog posts discussing the planned introduction of a higher-level database persistence API.

This blog post explores the proposed new strategy to simplify the Magento installation and upgrade processes. This new concept will allow a developer to get away from writing updates for each new version in favor of declaring the final result that the developer wants to achieve.

While chatting with some folks in the MageFront Slack channel, a question came up of “should HTML be removed from layout files.” Currently containers in the layout files have HTML markup in attributes. It avoids “yet another template file” but at the cost of mixing HTML into layout files blurring the line between markup and structural layout information. This blog post describes possible strategies for such a change.

The startSetup() and endSetup() methods are used in setup scripts. They are often at the beginning and the end of an upgrade/install method, like in “upgrade()” method of Magento/Catalog/Setup/UpgradeData.php

The question is “do you really need them?” Or does it just “look necessary”? This blog post explores what these functions do and then explains when you do and do not need to use these methods.

We are considering some changes in allocating IDs for entities. This includes well known entities (Product, Category, Customer, Order, etc.) and other secondary entities (newsletter subscriptions, authentication rules, etc.). This blog post discusses pros and cons of different strategies with a focus on Magento. We wanted to open this discussion up for community feedback. This is being considered as a part of possible future database API work. Comments are welcome!