Atwix MageNews – March 2020

We are opening spring season with MageNews March 🙌
Amidst the COVID-19 outbreak we provide you with a different type of news – everything you need to know about what happened in the Magento world.
So take a deep breath and scroll down!

Content

  1. [Not To Miss] Magento Imagine Online Only
  2. [Not To Miss] Product Recommendation EAP
  3. [Not To Miss] Magento Association Volunteer Program
  4. [Not To Miss] Atwix Leads the Charge of Contributions
  5. [Community Experience] Custom Appearance for PageBuilder
  6. [Community Experience] Magento Releases and SemVer
  7. [Community Experience] Setup Contribution Environment
  8. [Community Experience] CD Handbook
  9. [Open Source] MSI In-Store Pickup Completed
  10. [Open Source] PWA Studio 5.0.1
  11. [Open Source] Useful Projects
  12. [Architecture] Cron Schedule Improvements
  13. Upcoming Events
  14. Want more?

Not to Miss

Magento Imagine Online Only

Adobe decided to make Magento Imagine and Adobe Summit online-only events this year and cancel the live event in Las Vegas. The reason is a situation around COVID-19 pandemic.


More Info:
– [Magento] Update on Magento Imagine at Adobe Summit

Product Recommendation EAP

Magento started an early access program for product recommendations. The product recommendations feature is an AI personalization marketing services based on Adobe Sensei that is capable of calculating different types of product recommendations for the homepage, category, product, cart pages (like similar products, “view this – view that”, “view this – bought that”, etc).

Essentially, the product recommendations require connector modules to be installed on the Magento 2.3 store. Connectors add JS snippets on the storefront to track customer behavior data and export catalog data on the Adobe Sensei side to analyze it and show the recommendations.

Adobe Sensei will create and train machine learning models for each website and store view on the received data.

Sign up for the Product Recommendation EAP and enable a personalized shoppable experience for your customers.

More Info:
– [Google Forms] Magento Product Recommendations Early Access Program
– [MerchDocs] Product Recommendations
– [DevDocs] Product Recommendations
– [NPM] Product Recommendations SDK
– [Atwix] MageNews Dec 2019 – Adobe Sensei Under the Hood

Magento Association Volunteer Program

Magento Association opened a volunteer program. Previously, Magento Association kicked off a membership program and got 1,300+ members registered. Now, there is a chance to take part in one of 5 committees and work with Magento Association Board members on empowering and formatting of Magento global community. All volunteers should be ready to dedicate some time for monthly committee meetings and accomplishing assigned tasks.

If you feel you can help Magento Association, don’t hold this off and sign up the right way by the link below.

More Info:
– [Magento Association] Volunteer-Led Committees & Charters

Atwix Leads the Charge of Contributions

Atwix became the number one contributor to Magento codebase in 2019 as well as in 2018 and keeps leading the board in 2020. Get inspired from our story in the Magento blog post below.


More Info:
– [Magento] Meet the World’s Top Magento eCommerce Developers
– [Magento] Inside Atwix: the #1 Contributor to Magento

Community Experience

Custom Appearance for PageBuilder

This is a step-by-step instruction on how to add a custom view for PageBuilder built-in components from adding a new option to Admin UI to styling a new view on the frontend.


More Info:
– [Magento DevDocs] PageBuilder – How to add an appearance
– [Github] PageBuilder – Component Custom Appearance Example

Magento Releases and SemVer

Important summary from Vinai Kopp about Magento release versions. They look like semantic versions but actually they are not. This is still a point of confusion for many people in the community. Take your time to digest this information by reading a thread below.

Setup Contribution Environment

Are you a Magento partner? Get familiar how to contribute to Magento Commerce, B2B modules and PageBuilder from a comprehensive guide from Łukasz Bajsarowicz.


More Info:
– [M2.tips] Contribution to Magento Commerce
– [Github] Magento Commerce modules (Partners Access Only)
– [Github] Magento B2B modules (Partners Access Only)
– [Github] Magento PageBuilder modules (Partners Access Only)

CD Handbook

Community Engineering Team collected their experience and released a handbook on how to organize Magento contribution days. The document includes venue requirements, agenda examples, work with EngCom Team on backlog preparing and so on. This will be definitely useful next time you organize the event!
More Info:
– [Magento OpenSource] Contribution Day Organizer’s Handbook

Open Source

MSI In-Store Pickup Completed

We are happy to announce that MSI In-Store Pickup MVP is completed. This is the second big milestone in the story of the MSI project and it’s already passed to QA stage. The feature will be generally available in Magento 2.4.0 and there will be also EAP for early adopters. Now don’t miss the complete demo with the main use cases by In-Store Pickup community team.

More Info:
– [Youtube] MSI In-Store Pickup – Complete Demo

PWA Studio 5.0.1

PWA Studio released a patch 5.0.1 version which includes image loading fixes and removing customer private information from the Apollo cache.

More Info:
– [Github] PWA Studio 5.0.1 – Release Notes
– [PWA Studio Github] Remove Customer Data Caching – Pull Request
– [Lars Roettig] A Review of Magento PWA Studio

Useful Projects

– elgentos/magento2-lightspeed – Magento 2 Lighthouse optimizations
– kiwicommerce/magento2-admin-activity – Magento 2 Admin Activity Logger
– swissup/module-marketplace – Magento2 modules and themes CLI installer
– fisheyehq/module-url-rewrite-optimiser – Magento2 module that stops URL rewrites for all category paths
– adobe/aem-core-cif-components – Adobe Experience Manager integration with Magento 2.3.4
– roma-glushko/mage-di-analyzer – Calculates and reports how Magento modules affect DI compilation

Architecture

Cron Schedule Improvements

Magento Cloud team announced upcoming improvements to cron scheduling mechanism. Improvements fix three cases that frequently happen during the store maintenance:
– if a cron job was terminated, Magento will restart it in a day
– if some cron group has a long-running job, it will stuck execution of remaining jobs in the group
– if Magento works with the cron_schedule table, deadlocks are possible

Taking that, the Magento team essentially introduced a new failed cron jobs detection. Also, they got Magento to retry queries in the deadlock-prone places and replaced the locking of the cron group to cron job level locking.

The improvements will be a part of Magento 2.3.5. However, patches for previous versions are available in the Magento Cloud Patches repo right now.

More Info:
– [Youtube] Magento Cloud Demo – Cron and locks + warm-up with Bohdan Korablov and Oleksandr Shmyheliuk
– [Magento Cloud Patches] Fix Cron deadlocks and improve cron job locking patch (2.3.3)

Upcoming Events

– End of March – Magento Imagine @ Adobe Summit, Online
– May 13-14th – Magento Live @ Adobe Summit EMEA, London

Want more?

Make sure to be the first for our April MageNews digest – subscribe to our blog.

See you in a month!

Other Digests:
– Atwix MageNews – February 2020
– Atwix MageNews – 2019 in Review