Atwix MageNews – April 2020

COVID-19 has affected the Magento community in different ways, both on a personal level and more broadly as it relates to each of our working environments. On behalf of the Atwix #MageNews team, we hope everyone is safe and healthy.

This issue, like past posts, centers on providing you timely and significant updates that will impact the Magento landscape and change the eCommerce world. However, we made sure to include potential impacts COVID-19 has caused, as well as our recommended solutions and guidance.

…so get yourself comfortable, there is a lot of material to cover this month.

Content

  1. [Magento Imagine] Magento 2.4
  2. [Magento Imagine] PWA Updates
  3. [Magento Imagine] B2B Updates
  4. [Magento Imagine] Payment Request API
  5. [Magento Imagine] Product Recommendations
  6. [Magento Imagine] Magento Cloud Updates
  7. [Magento Imagine] PageBuilder Updates
  8. [COVID-19] Got Your Business Impacted? We Are Here To Help
  9. [COVID-19] Economy vs COVID-19
  10. [COVID-19] Ecommerce vs COVID-19
  11. [Security] BuyRequestInfo Logs Customer Credentials
  12. [Community Experience] Get Started with PWA Studio
  13. [Open Source] Magento PHPStorm Plugin
  14. [Architecture] Controllerโ€™s Decomposition
  15. Canceled Events
  16. Upcoming Events
  17. Want More?

Magento Imagine

Unfortunately, Adobe’s annual Las Vegas event was cancelled due to the pandemic. For those of you who have attended in the past, you know how special this event was for our ecosystem. To make lemonade out of lemons, Magento Imagine was shifted online and took place as part of Adobe’s virtual Summit 2020. The Magento-centered track was organized as a separate Commerce breakout, kicked off by Adobe’s VP of Commerce Jason Woosley. Jason covered a product overview and roadmap, and the introduction of 9 related follow on Commerce sessions.

We took notes for you. Below are key announcements from the individual Commerce track sessions.

Magento 2.4

Magento 2.4 is coming in Q3 2020:

PWA Updates

Magento is going to double down their efforts in 2020 to speed up Magento PWA Studio adoption:
– fully complete B2C functionality in Venia theme
– start working on a new PWA-enabled B2B theme
– integrate Magento Marketplace with PWA-enabled extensions

The PWA Studio multi-language support is coming in Q3 2020:

PWA Adoption

Magento Imagine makes it clear that Magento’s future with PWA has arrived. 14 companies were mentioned as early adopters of PWA with at least one success showcase per each:

Also, we are thrilled to see our client, Wyze Labs, on the list of featured upcoming PWA projects:

A bit about Wyze labs and our work with them. Wyze Labs is a well established US-based company delivering smart home devices at affordable prices. For us at Atwix, it was obvious that a progressive B2C provider of next gen affordable home consumer products would benefit by taking their shopping experience to the next level with a PWA site on Magento.

So we partnered on this revolutionary change. The integration of PWA Studio took 2 months leveraging a team comprised of 6 people (1 PM, 3 Full Stack Developers, 1 QA Tester, and 1 Designer). The project is due for production release late April.

Wyze Labs is also on Magento Commerce Cloud. Add it all together, and this new architecture will showcase how Magento’s cutting-edge technologies can work, together, furthering its benefits to Wyze Lab’s business and user experiences to their customers.

B2B Updates

Magento is substantially investing in B2B capabilities turning real-life merchant feedbacks into next level B2B model support. The following are features we expect soon:
– flexible and sophisticated B2B purchasing workflows with approval thresholds and smart routings
– enhancements of import/export process focused on large catalogs
– enhancements of Magento Admin UX to make the life of B2B merchants easier

Payment Request Magento API

Payment Request API is now integrated into the Magento core. This integration enables frictionless checkout capabilities:

Product Recommendations

AI-based Magento Product Recommendations will be made available on April 14th:

Expect to be amazed by Magento Product Recommendation. The plans look really impressive:

Magento Cloud Updates

Magento Cloud investments are focused on total cost of ownership (TCO), time to market (TTM), performance and reliability. For example, the following features and integrations are expected later this year:
– hosting Magento Cloud builds on the Microsoft Azure cloud
– intelligent auto-scaling
– enhanced monitoring capabilities

PageBuilder Updates

Magento PageBuilder is really evolving:
– integration with Product Recommendations (end of Q2 2020)
– video backgrounds (in Magento 2.3.5)
– content templates (in Magento 2.3.5)
– content template import/export (in Q4 2020)
– shoppable content (in Q4 2020)

The Magento PageBuilder’s long term plan is centered on mobile optimization for produced content.

Magento AI Roadmap Candidates

And if we needed any more reasons to celebrate, Magento AI offers merchants untold business, product and CX potential:

More Info:
– [Adobe] Key Note: Expanding Commerce Opportunities for Companies of All Sizes – Magento Imagine 2020
– [Adobe] B2B Customer Experience Meets PWA at Carrier Enterprise – Magento Imagine 2020
– [Adobe] Launching Omnichannel Retail in China in 6 months: The Allbirds Story – Magento Imagine 2020
– [Adobe] Going Headless with Magento Commerce – Magento Imagine 2020
– [Adobe] Commerce-led, Experience-led, or Headless: Choosing the Right Approach – Magento Imagine 2020
– [Adobe] Page Builder, PWA Studio, and the Magento Commerce Experience – Magento Imagine 2020
– [Adobe] Adobe Sensei Powers Magento Product Recommendations – Magento Imagine 2020
– [Adobe] Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: How Larson-Juhl Modernized Its Business – Magento Imagine 2020
– [Adobe] Integrating Magento with External Systems – Magento Imagine 2020

COVID-19

Is Your Business Impacted? We Are Here To Help

Adobe eCommerce is committed to its partners and its customers. Adobe, in response to business impairments related to COVID-19, is rolling out additional support and new resources to help navigate this challenging time:
– 3 months free license for Magento Commerce, Marketo Engage or Bizible products
– Magento Commerce Launch Package that includes launching Magento Commerce in the Cloud in 2 weeks

Interested? Make sure to attend the upcoming Magento-hosted webinar highlighting new offerings and tips including how you can maximize your Magento platform and partnership.

In addition, eCommerce communities are leaning in to help one another. One great great example is an alliance of communities that have come together across Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce and other specialists. This alliance is actively comparing and aggregating much needed knowledge and capacities in a coordinated effort to collectively address and provide support to COVID-19 impacted merchants:

More Info:
– [Magento Blog] Adobe Announces Offerings to Help Small & Mid-Sized Companies
– [offline2on.com] Get Your Business Online and Back to Work โ€” Fast
– [Magento] The True Cost Savings of Magento Commerce 2 Webinar

Economy vs COVID-19

COVID-19 hit the economy hard, the world over. Ultimately, all events were canceled (many shifted online), local businesses were forced to lock their physical storefronts, global tourism was paused, and supply chains and international trade significantly slowed down.

This disruption is peaking in the US, where the pandemic has led to 20+ million Americans filing for unemployment benefits…just over a month. On top of job losses, the financial markets have been rocked, flipping a seemingly healthy bull market to what economists already view as a recession heading towards a possible depression. As a comparison to something historically similar, American unemployment hit 24.9% during the Great Depression in 1933.

Beyond the US, the economic impact is also severe. The following are European Union and UKย  GDP decreases year-to-date:
– Germany – more than 5% drop
– Spain – up to 10% drop
– France – up to 7% drop
– Italy – up to 6% drop
– UK – up to 8% drop

More Info:
– [Atwix Blog] COVID-19, E-Commerce and the Black Swan
– [Yahoo Finance] Coronavirus job losses ‘way worse than anything we saw in the Great Depression:’ Economist
– [Yahoo Finance] Dow 15,000 very likely as coronavirus pandemic hits U.S. economy: strategist

E-Commerce vs COVID-19

Work-from-home requirements to flatten the COVID-19 bell curve (reflecting those testing positive to the virus) are now fully in place around the world. This dramatic shift in working conditions and environments had a quick and profound impact on all businesses, big and small, near and far, all industries.

Buying behaviors shifted dramatically. The following are just a few noteworthy consumer changes that merchants are now seeing first hand and adjusting their respective businesses to support:

  • Choosing more equipment for creating home offices (monitors, chairs, desks, keyboards, mice)
  • Seeking additional health-related items (fitness and yoga gears, health monitors).
  • Prioritizing more indoor entertainment items (like ping pong, games for kids, films)
  • Devaluing outdoor activity consumption (campaign and volleyball equipment, coolers, automotive accessories).
  • Purchasing more cooking supplies and foods (buy bread machines, refrigerators, cooking ingredients; packaged and canned food, snacks, and coffee).

A total pause on demanding travel and event related items (luggage, briefcases, cameras, sunglasses, swimwear and party supplies).

Surges in personal protective gear from masks and gloves to gun sales.

More Info:
– [Firebear] The Impact of Coronavirus on Retail, E-Commerce, & Magento
– [Stackline] Top 100 Fastest Growing & Declining Categories in E-commerce
– [The Hill] COVID-19, gun sales and guns in homes

Security

BuyRequestInfo Logs Customer Credentials

Prior to version 2.3.3 Magento used to log customer credentials if adding product to wishlist required customer sign in.

Magento released a patch and database cleanup script to remove saved credentials and the possibility to store login data. The following areas may be affected:
– wishlists
– quotes
– orders
– gift registries
– RMA
– negotiable quotes

Even if you are on Magento 2.3.3 and later you still should check your database to see whether it’s affected.

More Info:
– [Magento Help Center] Remove failed login attempts from the database
– [GitHist] Data Cleanup Script that covers wishlist/quote/sales tables by Peter Jaap Blaakmeer
– [Magento Security Center] Hot fix available for CVE-2019-8118

Community Experience

Get Started with PWA Studio

Learn PWA Studio customization approaches shared by Lars Roettig, one of active community members and PWA Studio contributors.

More Info:
– [Lars Roettig] Getting started with Magento PWA Studio

Open Source

Magento PhpStorm Plugin

Magento PhpStorm plugin was brought back to life by a great initiative of our fellow colleague Vitaliy Boiko. The plugin is crucial to accelerate work on the Magento development. It reduces development cost and mistakes while working with tight IDE integration providing handy code generations, intelligent inspections, navigation between files and so on.

The next version of the plugin is coming soon, don’t miss brand new features. We highlighted a few of them:
– new Magento module generation
– new observer generation for various areas
– new frontend/adminhtml block and viewModel generation
– all kind of plugin generation
– duplicated observer name inspection
– cachable=false in layout inspection

Follow the project on Github as well as share your ideas and dreams about how IDE can help us to do our work more efficiently.

More Info:
– [Github] magento/magento2-phpstorm-plugin
– [Magento Community Slack] PhpStorm Plugin Channel
– [JetBrains] Install Magento PhpStorm

Architecture

Controller’s Decomposition

In 2.4, Magento made a big step toward using composition by removing inheritance in controller architecture.

Abstract classes like Magento\Framework\App\Action\Action and Magento\Backend\App\AbstractAction will be marked as deprecated. It will be enough to create a plain PHP class that implements HTTP action interfaces (like HttpGetActionInterface) to get your controller working. The changes will bring performance improvements and make it easier to test controllers.

This awesome update was delivered by great cooperation and effort from Lukasz Bajsarowicz, Vinai Kopp and Magento Community Engineering Team.

More Info:
– [Magento DevBlog] Decomposition of Magento Controllers

Canceled Events

– MM20DE
– MageTitansNL
– MM20IT

Upcoming Events

– Jun 17th โ€“ MM20UK, Online
– Postponed โ€“ Adobe Summut EMEA, London

Want more?

We know much was provided in this latest Atwix MageNews. We also know this moment in time is murky and seemingly unstable, to say the least. Please reach out if you need to discuss these notes or just have a Magento related question. We are very happy to actively listen to you and provide any recommendations or guidance we can. Lastly, be sure to subscribe to our Atwix blog to make sure you receive upcoming posts.

Stay safe and healthy!

Other Digests:
– Atwix MageNews โ€“ March 2020
– Atwix MageNews โ€“ February 2020