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Magento 2.3 GA release has finally landed. It is one of the most awaited releases that Magento ever had, and it is a thrilling moment for us at Atwix. Not only our clients can now benefit from all the new features that are available in 2.3, but also we can now see live features that our team developed working closely with other community contributors as well as Magento Community Engineering team.

In order to add a custom layout handle to category page, a (basic) Magento 2 module with these additional files and their content is needed:

1. The events.xml file to “subscribe” to the event and say which observer should be fired ↵
2. An observer that adds a new layout handle to the page ↵
3. A layout file that adds needed changes to the page ↵

It’s not a secret that every good vacation needs some planning. But this article is not about the place to go to, how to get the cheapest tickets or what stuff to take. This one is on how to prepare yourself mentally and what preparations to take before leaving your team or company for a vacation period and come back with minimum or no setbacks.

JavaScript bundling is an optimization technique you can use to reduce the number of server requests for JavaScript files. It is achieved by merging multiple JavaScript files together into one file to reduce the number of page requests. By default, Magento 2 allows excluding the particular JavaScript files from bundling by specifying the corresponding file in exclude node of the etc/view.xml file for a theme. However, sometimes it’s not enough.

Hello, I will be glad to share with you a few interesting tools that I use in QA work to make developer’s life a little bit more difficult.

As we all know developer’s life is hard. But we have QA to make it harder. We try to find problems or break something that developer has created. Let me tell you about tools that help me with it in manual web application testing.

Recently more and more people online bring up the topic of soft skills, its importance at the workplace and influence on the overall hierarchy and mood within the company.
But today I would like to cover its impact on the general productivity and draw a line between soft and so-called “hard skills” and also I would like to dispel a myth of importance soft skills only for managers.

Magento provides the Cart Price Rules marketing feature, which allows applying discounts to items in the shopping cart, based on a set of conditions. The discount can be applied automatically as soon as the conditions are met, or when the customer enters a valid coupon code. The coupon codes can be generated per cart price rule via admin panel in Marketing -> Cart Price Rulessection. However, sometimes we need to automate this process. Let’s find out how to create a cart price rule and generate coupon codes programmatically in Magento 2.

Most likely, at least once you faced the issue when customer session does not work except an account page etc. And usually, it’s not obvious why. Is it a bug? No, actually that is the case when it’s not a bug, it’s kind of feature.

The Magento page cache library contains a simple PHP reverse proxy that enables page content caching. There are two types of distinguished content: private and public.

The “private” content is being served for each user separately and represents the personalized data of a customer. E.g. shopping cart, wishlist, customer addresses, notification messages. This data should not be cached on the server side, and should not be shown to more than one user. The private content is stored on the client’s side by Customer Data JS component (Magento_Customer/js/customer-data.js). However, this is a topic for another blog post. Today we will focus on the second content type – public content, or rather the cacheable content and its variations in terms of customer grouping.

The startSetup() and endSetup() methods are commonly used for schema and data setup scripts by many developers. But do we actually need to call these methods for every install or upgrade script implementation? The correct answer may be quite unexpected. :) No, we don’t need to use these methods by default in our setup scripts in most cases. Let’s find out why.