Atwix blog

Adobe’s eCommerce platform, Magento, is one of the most popular if not most powerful solutions on the market. There are many reasons this platform is unique in its ability to scale B2B and B2C organizations without sacrificing or degrading performance or security.

Extensibility, for example.

Magento allows you to augment native system functionality with preset modules available at the Magento Marketplace or via approved 3rd party vendor websites. When using standard Magento with server side rendering (Luma-based theme or similar approach), there is no need for additional development (outside of basic configuration is required).

Happy New Year, Magento community! For those of us working in eCommerce, last year felt more like a decade. B2B and B2C businesses as well as Adobe ecosystem partners faced quick and intense change. However, we (virtually) came together —  by innovating, learning, and growth. In this way, we collectively have reason to celebrate — we met the moment. While turning the page, let’s spend a bit of time recapping 2020 and predicting what is likely to occur in 2021.

2020 is nearly complete. The holiday season is now well underway. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone. End of year holidays remain in front of us. Even though we have a few more weeks left, this year will clearly be remembered as one unlike any. In reality, this year felt more like a decade than it did a year. For good reason. New norms were instantly forced on all of us. Impacted by a global pandemic and rapid economic change, ongoing uncertainty and instant pivots in market consumption trends, user behaviors, and general working norms — in 2020 we all experienced much and it changed how we now live our personal and professional lives.

It has been almost a year since we resumed work on Adobe’s Magento PhpStorm plugin. It’s fair to say that balancing merchant work with open source project contribution is not done easily. Especially during the build-up to the holiday season, when all of our client businesses ramp up their online eCommerce plans – requesting that agencies like Atwix ramp up development efforts, as well.

We all have 24 hours in a day, right? Kidding aside, with all the community’s interest, passion and motivation aligned, and now on the other side of the holiday sprint season, there is a clear need and now some time to re-commit effort to this critical community engineering project. And critical this project is! The number of people using this plugin defies the imagination. There were more than 70,000 downloads in November 2020. Almost every Magento developer is affected.

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.