Atwix MageNews — October 2021

The Focusing October

This edition of Atwix MageNews was called Focusing October for a reason. While the eCommerce businesses are preparing for the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas sales events, they also start focusing on the upcoming year’s planning. It is an excellent practice to have a vision of your business in its current state and some decades forward.

Focusing on the future in the eCommerce industry is a complex process. To make the right decision about the next step in business development, you shall consider many factors like technology, marketing, sales data analysis, and even new trends in social media. Long term success of the growth strategy conclusions is possible only when based on profound knowledge in the spheres described above. And by success, we mean not just a higher revenue but also predicting and mitigating the risks.

In the October edition of the MageNews, we will focus on the crucial news and updates for the 2022 strategic planning: upcoming Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source release, changes for Magento Marketplace and, of course, Magento Community updates. Let’s not wait any longer and jump into them!

Content

  1. The New Market Rules to be Introduced for Tech Giants?
  2. Magento 2.4.4 release breaking news
  3. Magento Marketplace Changes: subscriptions are coming
  4. Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source Q4 Releases: Security Updates
  5. Magento Association Connect
  6. Magento Open Source: What’s Next?
  7. Upstream Compatibility & Backward-Compatible Development
  8. Architecture Evolution: from Monolith to Composable
  9. New Contribution Programm: The First Patch Delivered
  10. Upcoming Events

The New Market Rules to be Introduced for Tech Giants?

American governors claim that they will soon introduce a major antitrust bill aimed at Big Tech. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act would prohibit dominant online platforms from engaging in discriminatory behavior. The bill would have profound implications for companies like Amazon, Apple and Google which all run their own marketplaces for products or information. 

Those companies have been accused of ranking their own products higher than rivals’ in an attempt to generate more profits for themselves. Third-party sellers on Amazon, for example, have suspected the platform ranks its own similar private-label products over their own. Travel or local search sites like Yelp and Tripadvisor have complained that Google unfairly lowers their links in search results in favor of prime placement of its Google Maps tool. 

Will we enter a new era with game changing Tech environment? Time will show!  More details available: Klobuchar, Grassley to lead antitrust bill barring Big Tech from disadvantaging rivals

Magento 2.4.4 release breaking news

A significant release 2.4.4 of the Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source is coming. It is crucial because of many things like PHP 8.1 compatibility, frameworks updates, and many other beneficial upgrades. With the PHP 8.1 compatibility, platforms will unlock the power of the PHP 8 performance and its new features – one of the most popular programming languages. In addition to this, do not forget about the security aspect, which has also improved in the PHP 8.1 release.

But this release can be challenging because it contains backwards-incompatible changes. And to make this release more smoothly, the Adobe company announced the beta version program, which will last for four months as of October 18, 2021 

With the 2.4.4 beta program, you’ll get an understanding of where in the codebase changes are happening, and start preparing 5 months before GA (March 8th). You will also be able to provide valuable feedback to our team and help us find and correct issues.

2.4.4 beta releases are coming soon article

It is an excellent opportunity for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source based projects to prepare for the platform upgrade in 2022. To get more information about the release timeline and Beta Program, read the official article on the DevBlog – BREAKING NEWS: 2.4.4 beta releases are soon published by Stanislav Idolov.

Magento Marketplace Changes: subscriptions are coming

In September, Adobe made the pre-announcement of subscription functionality available on Magento Marketplace. Now we all witness how the ecosystem is changing with more and more Magento extension providers joining this market change. Amasty, Mageplaza, Aheadwoks, Mirasvit, Mageworx, Meetanshi, and MageComp, announced that starting next year, they are switching from a “one-time payment” approach to annual product subscriptions. 

That means that starting from February 1, 2022, each extension will come with a 1-year warranty with access to updates and support services. To have such access, customers will need to keep their subscriptions active. However, regardless of the subscription status, customers will keep lifetime access to the code base and updates released during their active subscription and the right to use and customize the purchased extensions. 

The subscription-based business model has already proven its efficiency. We are sure that constant investment in product, R&D, and services will help vendors bring more value to the ecosystem and deliver regular functional updates based on the latest development and user experience practices, higher product quality and warranties for services consistency.

Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source Q4 Releases: Security Updates

On October 12, 2021, Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source were improved by the new security updates 2.4.3-p1 and 2.3.7-p2. Substantial improvements were introduced and look especially good for the upcoming active sales period. Having a stable and secure platform is crucial when you are focusing on future growth and stressless planning.

A list of announcements was introduced for a variety of products. 

  • Product Recommendations powered by Adobe Sensei (Commerce)
  • Live Search powered by Adobe Sensei (Commerce) 
  • Progressive Web Applications (Commerce and Open Source) 
  • Payment Services (Commerce and Open Source)
  • Asynchronous (High Throughput) Order Processing 

The Payment Service and Asynchronous announcements look very promising!

Coming later in Q4, we will introduce Payment Services for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source in North America. Merchants of all sizes will soon have access to a robust, secure, and easily integrated payment solution that can be directly managed from their product Admin.

We are also introducing enhancements to the Adobe Commerce checkout and cart functionality that support customers with exponentially larger scale needs. With the proper configuration and setup, this optional configuration allows asynchronous order processing, dramatically increasing order throughput and line items in the cart. This feature is currently in beta and will become generally available in December.

More details are available in the official article – Adobe Commerce brings multiple security and product updates in Q4 releases.

Magento Association Connect

October 21, 2021, is the day when Magento Association Connect will take place.

This conference unites professionals, enthusiasts, and leaders worldwide and concentrates on the ecosystem’s knowledge and expertise. 

Speakers list looks impressive:

So many interesting people to hear!

Visiting such events and hearing the voice of professionals is an excellent opportunity to collect knowledge and experience to make the right decisions for long-term business growth. We recommend adding it to your calendar and hope to meet you there virtually!

Magento Open Source: What’s Next?

In September 2021, the Open letter to the Magento Community was published. It has triggered many discussions in the Magento community. And, of course, the Magento Open Source’s future was discussed during the Meet Magento Poland 2021 in September.

If you want to go quickly – go alone. If you want to go far – take a company.

Slava Kravchuk, Board of Directors Magento Association.

This expression shortly described the direction of the ongoing discussion. And this tweet is a constructive summary of some discussions:

We have collected the selection of materials around this topic – to keep you posted and welcoming to join the discussion:

Selecting the Members of the Magento Open Source Task Force by Joshua Warren

Upstream Compatibility & Backward-Compatible Development

The name of this paragraph is a quotation from the post published by Igor Minyaylo – Engineering challenges behind upstream compatibility. This article provides an overview of the technical details of the current situation with the Magento maintenance, improvements and updates delivery. This material continues the discussion about Magento Open Source’s future.

Disclaimer: current post does not describe an official position of Adobe Inc. It represents an engineer’s opinion who is currently on paternity leave and will celebrate the 10th anniversary of working with the platform next month.

During the last two weeks, there were quite a lot of discussions after the initial publication of an open letter to the Magento Community. Most of those discussions did not dive deep into technical aspects. I want to put aside all the non-technical sides of the problem where my opinion might be considered as biased and focus on upstream compatibility and backward compatible development in general.

Igor Menaylo

Questions related to eCommerce cannot be fully overviewed only from one side – technical or no-technical. They are closely related and affect each other. Share yours in the comments section!

Architecture Evolution: from Monolith to Composable

Another constructive and highly recommended material from Igor Minyaylo describes the long way of the platform’s evolution from monolith architecture to composable. 

In this material, Igor describes milestones completed in the process of Magento platform architecture improvement. The retrospective understanding of this process is a beneficial experience that may help future planning: knowing the direction of the platform changes allows focus resources effectively and get ready for the upcoming changes. 

New Contribution Programme: The First Patch Delivered

In Atwix MageNews – August 2021, we provided an overview of the new beneficial process for patch delivery with the help of Magento Quality Patches (MQP). This is a really good approach for making Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source based projects more stable and compatible with the upcoming releases. And, of course, this approach in combination with the New Delivery Process for Community Contributions provides a really great opportunity to use the whole power of the Magento Community by increasing delivery speed for fixes and improvements.

Great news – the first patch had recently been delivered for the Magento Open Source 2.4.3! Kudos to its creator  Shankar Konar!

Upcoming Events

October 21st – Magento Association Connect ft. the Magento Association Town Hall

Need help with Magento customization? Atwix would be happy to help!