Atwix MageNews – June 2020

Welcome to MageNews June!
The Magento community was busy this past month. Nothing new there! The Atwix team combed through the activity and selected some of the best content across the Magento ecosystem and eCommerce landscape. Grab yourself a coffee (or tea) and enjoy this month’s entry.

Content

  1. [Merchant] Facebook Shops
  2. [Merchant] The Forrester Wave
  3. [Merchant] Magento 1 End Of Life
  4. [Marketing] Google Core Updates
  5. [Community] Adobe Partner Program
  6. [Community] Magento Association Co-Op
  7. [Community] MerchDocs Update
  8. [Community] Online Kyiv Magento Meetup
  9. [Technical] Global Custom Layout Updates
  10. [Technical] GraphQl Coverage
  11. Upcoming Events
  12. Want more?

Merchant

Facebook Shops

Facebook is pushing the concept of social commerce to the next level with its announcement of Facebook Shops. Facebook Shops is an accessible way for small and mid-sized businesses to set up a single online store for their customers to access Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. This entry point is going to create a seamless shopping experience for businesses and their customers across Facebook owned assets. Facebook Shops will support:
– managing catalog
– products discovery through stories, videos and live shopping from them
– AI-based personalization and AR capabilities
– handling shipping, logistic and sending transactional messages
– loyalty program
– customer assistance by answering questions via WhatsApp, Instagram Direct or Facebook Messenger

Facebook Shops intends to become a new sales channel for B2C brands. Beyond B2C, Facebook envisions facilitating consumer-to-consumer models, as well, in helping grow a new generation of entrepreneurs who natively understand the power of their social network.

More Info:
– [Facebook] Introducing Facebook Shops: Helping Small Businesses Sell Online
– [Shopify] Shopify partners with Facebook to help businesses launch branded Facebook Shops
– [PracticalCommerce] Facebook Shops Are an Ecommerce Game Changer

The Forrester Wave

Forrester recognized Adobe/Magento as a leading platform for B2C and B2B businesses in the recent The Forrester Wave report.

Adobe was one of 13 vendors listed in the B2B Wave and one of 10 vendors listed in the B2C Wave. Both reports evaluated Strategy, Current Offering, and Market Presence.

Forrester highlighted these key features of Magento platform:
– active, loyal, highly capable development ecosystem
– strong global partner ecosystem
– rich out-of-the-box feature set
– PWA Studio to lower cost of creating progressive storefronts
– integrations with Adobe creative tools

More Info:
– [Adobe] Adobe Named a LEADER in The Forrester Wave™: B2C and B2B Commerce Suites
– [Adobe] The Forrester Wave™: B2C Commerce Suites, Q2 2020
– [Adobe] The Forrester Wave™: B2B Commerce Suites, Q2 2020

Magento 1 End Of Life

Adobe is going to support Magento 1 through June 30th. In essence, this means that Magento will stop creating official security patches and updates for Magento 1 after that date. As a consequence, merchants who chose to stay on the outdated platform are solely responsible for meeting PCI DSS requirements, mitigating data breaches, and emerging security incidents.

Not only will the platform become out of date, but PHP 7.2, which Magento 1 currently supports, will reach end-of-support in November 2020.

If you are asking yourself how to deal with Magento 1 End-of-Life if you are still a Magento 1 merchant, we highly recommend evaluating the consequences surrounding end-of-support. The security risks are more than real, as Magento is a popular eCommerce platform.

It’s well understood that hackers will want to explore new security vulnerabilities. Another reason is that it may well become a problem to prolong PCI compliance after Magento 1 EoL.

Learn more about risks in our extended article.

Magento 1 merchants will eventually need to migrate to another supported eCommerce platform. There is no one-size-fits-all solution here. A merchant will need to revisit their business, processes, and eCommerce expectations in choosing their next platform.

For those Magento 1 merchants who are thinking about Magento 2 migration, service integrators offer great and swift migration packs. For example, Atwix offers three Magento Express Packages to support merchants of all sizes and with varying business demands.

For those who need more time to decide where to go, there are great initiatives from the Magento ecosystem like:
– MageOne – a paid 3rd-party security patch vendor
– Sansec – an eCommerce security scanning tool for mitigating MageCart-like attacks
– Nexcess – Safe Harbor Program
– OpenMage LTS – a community-driven fork of Magento 1 CE
– and other heroes that are working with Magento 1 merchants post-EoL

Nothing lasts forever, and the Magento 1 era moves closer and closer towards its end. It is our hope and core belief that with the help of the Magento ecosystem, Magento 1 merchants will flip what might appear as a big time challenges into new possibilities for their businesses and, by extension, their customers.

More Info:
– [Atwix] Magento 1 End Of Life & Migration to Magento 2
– [Nexcess] Magento 1 End of Life: What You Need to Know
– [Github] OpenMage LTS
– [PayPal] Magento 1 End of Life Announcement
– [Nexcess] Safe Harbor Program
– [Magento Association] The End Is Here
– [Magento Association] Magento 1 Post-EOL Resources
– [Atwix] MageNews April 2020 – Is Your Business Impacted? We Are Here To Help

Marketing

Google Core Updates

Google released a planned quarterly update. The core updates usually include significant, broad changes to the search algorithms and systems. They help Google show relevant, authoritative, quality content to searchers. If you received negative experiences with the update, check out the following recommendations from the Google Webmaster team.

More Info:
– [Google Webmaster Blog] What webmasters should know about Google’s core updates
– [Google] Search Quality Rating Program
– [MHC] What is E-A-T?

Community

Adobe Roadmap Acceleration Initiative

Adobe announced a new program to help small and mid-sized agencies going through uncertain times. The program’s aim is to help keep agencies afloat by funding idle developers. Adobe will use the development resources to help develop the roadmap features, documentation, improvements, and test coverage.

The goal is to let developers keep their jobs and agencies to not furlough their employees amidst the global economic downturn – and Adobe will benefit from an accelerated timeline.

If you are interested in this program, reach out to your Magento Partner Manager for details.

More Info:
– [Magento Blog] Supporting Our Solution Partners and Developers During These Unprecedented Times
– [CIO] New Adobe Program Aims to Benefit Magento Partners and Developers in Unprecedented Times

Magento Association Co-Op

Magento Association launched a new website and Commerce Co-Op – a community content hub. Check it out. There are many articles from the community rockstars:
– My Journey to Get Magento Certified by Alessandro Ronchi
– Best Practices for Magento 2 Programming by Mark Shust
– How to Maximize Working Remotely by Alex Lunkov
– Tips for Managing Your Magento Store During the COVID-19 Crisis by John Hughes
– Helping Magento Merchants by Doug O’Dwyer

Another important update from Magento Association is the Magento Association Connect event, which recently took place online. Over 1300 people attended the event making it the largest community-driven Magento conference in its history.

Magento Association has truly started to connect and shape the Magento ecosystem. Don’t miss your chance to be part of this – become a Magento Association member!

More Info:
– [Magento Association] Homepage
– [Magento Association] Events
– [Magento Association] Commerce Co-Op
– [Atwix] MA Connect and the future of Magento events

MerchDocs Update

Merchant Documentation got a new look! The duplicated content across the platform versions and editions was unified. This improves UX and searchability.

More Info:
– [Magento DevBlog] Unified User Guide for Magento 2.3

Online Kyiv Magento Meetup Recordings

We secured recordings of Online Kyiv Magento Meetup sessions. The event was organized by Atwix for Ukrainian and Russian-speaking Magento community. We were glad to see all 250+ attendees. Check them out:
– Semi-PWA store on Magento Commerce Cloud [RU] by Yaroslav Rogoza
– PhpStorm Plugin Development Workshop [UA] by Vitalii Boiko
– Something Architecture [RU] by Igor Miniailo
– Magento maintainer: about decision making, work with community and other things [RU] by Alexander Shkurko
– Asynchronous Magento [RU] by Oleksandr Lyzun
– Emergency Plan: How quickly adapt to changes in eCommerce [RU] by Yaroslava Upatova

More Info:
– [Atwix] Kyiv Magento Online Meetup May 2020 – Playlist

Technical

GraphQl Coverage

Magento moved a little bit closer to the full GraphQl coverage. Atwix engineers together with the Magento Architects team worked hard on bringing remaining endpoints for B2C features like:
– wishlist
– gift card
– gift wrapping
– product reviews
– customer password reset
– newsletter subscription

We’re looking forward to seeing these features included in the upcoming Magento 2.4 release.
More Info:
– [Github] Add GraphQL mutations for Reset password for MyAccount
– [Github] Adding Product Reviews GraphQl support
– [Github] Added GiftWrappingGraphQl module
– [Github] Adding Wishlist GraphQl coverage

Global Custom Layout Updates

Since version 2.3.4, Magento removed layout update fields from the Magento Admin for security purposes. The following module helps apply global layout updates in a handy way:

More Info:
– [Github] integer-net/magento2-global-custom-layout – Module for Magento 2 that allows you to add global layout update files to be selected from admin
– [Atwix] MageNews Feb 2020 – Magento 2.3.4 Security Enhancements

Upcoming Events

– Jun 17th – MM20UK, Online
– Jul 22-23th – Adobe Expirience Makers Live, Online

Want more?

July promises to be just as busy, and the new MageNews issue is just around the corner – subscribe to our blog.

See you in a month!

Other Digests:
– Atwix MageNews – May 2020
– Atwix MageNews – April 2020