Atwix blog

It is common knowledge, that you need to keep your Magento 2 up to date for both security and performance reasons. However, a lot of merchants find it hard to go through the update sequence and all the possible issues they may face. This blog post is not about how to update Magento. It is about highlighting key features, that were introduced in Magento starting from 2.3.0. So if you still think if you need to upgrade your store, let’s see what will come with that upgrade.

In a previous series article, The Maintainer’s Path – Interview with Vladimir Veselov, we shared the story of those who assist the Magento community from all over the world. These contributors provide expertise in reviewing other’s code and delivering their own code. We follow up this month with a story about the Community Engineering team. Our goal is to continually share unique Magento collaborations between eCommerce business and Magento Open Source. This combination of personal interests and professional goals is based, in large part, on individual passions and team-based enthusiasm to work across one another to tackle new horizons. The resulting effort helps to continually provide improvement and fixes, new direction and innovation, and an all-around stronger code base.

Quality Assurance is a crucial part of any development process before the deployment. It is important to be able to find new types of bugs, which are often quite unpredictable. Better preventing the issue than solving it. For that, there is a great tool – Exploratory Testing.

What is Exploratory Testing? Why do I need it and how will Exploratory Testing help me? This article will answer these questions no matter what your role is – QA Engineer, Developer, Designer, or Business Analyst.

To state the obvious, we have experienced dramatic and rapid change in our industry for eCommerce retailers and the 2020 year-end holiday shopping season will be very different from any other previous year — in terms of traffic, delivery, security. To keep pace with our customers, we must stay informed, adapt, and bring our best quality solutions… quickly. And we will!

It is hard to underestimate the power of like-minded people gathering together in one place. Especially for the Magento Community – where smart and passionate contributors co-create, coordinate and compete – all at the same time. But what to do when new norms kick in and it is not possible to meet up in-person? Of course, we play to our collective strengths. We share ideas and we innovate. The result was hosting MageConf 2020 all online realizing the same ‘ole in-person experience.

It’s been almost 2 months since we could touch and feel Magento 2.4. A new minor version of Magento with a better eCommerce security layer and long-waited B2B features aimed at improving merchant’s customer experience. If it’s the first time you are hearing about this, you might want to take a look at our summer review of it here.

I know I speak on behalf of many in saying, I am inspired and I am appreciative. We are a strong and passionate group of Magento engineers and we once again proved the power of community.

This past Friday and Saturday we hosted a 24 hours Contribution Day before the annual MageCONF 2020 conference. The “remote” opportunity – to get back together to connect, to code, to communicate, to share — despite all the lockdowns around the world cannot be under-appreciated. Modern systems for communication allow us not only to create traditional webinars but to move entire conferences online including networking, partner roadmaps and peer-led sessions. In short, it was a terrific event.

It remains open season, for Magento Open Source. As a general rule in our eCommerce world, we see Q3 as a calm period. We tend to take much-needed vacations. However, this year we see an absolutely different situation developing: tons of new contributions, lots of merged pull requests. The main reason is not only in postponed vacations stemming from the business impacts of COVID-19.

Much development continued on through Q3. This season we’ve finally got Magento 2.4 released. Countless development time went into processing all the features and addressing all the bug fixes. Those contributions are now complete – we were able to include much in the new release. This publication provides highlights of the release and a quick recap of what we accomplished in the Magento open source world during Q3.

In just few days we will rock Magento Community with the largest technical conference in the world – MageCONF 2020.  5 tracks and dozens of presentations on trending Magento news delivered by speakers from all over the world – all just one click away! We have news both for developers, PMs, QAs and companies’ management! Make sure you register and join us online on October 24th!

Welcome to the 21st edition of MageNews. 🎃

Being the new editor of Atwix’s monthly news digest — MageNews — is a great honor and responsibility. My hope is to build on the practical value my predecessor delivered. Our goal remains the same — to monitor and surface key drivers and highlights taking place in our incredible Magento ecosystem. We look to provide MageNews in an easy to read format. Ultimately, we want to further community knowledge and engagement by helping inform developers, merchants, and partners across the Magento world.

Let’s start!

– Alex Lunkov