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 remains open season, for Magento Open Source. As a general rule in our eCommerce world, we see Q3 as a calm period. We tend to take much-needed vacations. However, this year we see an absolutely different situation developing: tons of new contributions, lots of merged pull requests. The main reason is not only in postponed vacations stemming from the business impacts of COVID-19.

Much development continued on through Q3. This season we’ve finally got Magento 2.4 released. Countless development time went into processing all the features and addressing all the bug fixes. Those contributions are now complete – we were able to include much in the new release. This publication provides highlights of the release and a quick recap of what we accomplished in the Magento open source world during Q3.

Back in 2017 Magento has made a move which many of us couldn’t fully comprehend back then. It was a creation of the completely new business unit – Community Engineering department, and Max Yekaterynenko, Magento’s then Director of Development, became a head of it. First months it wasn’t quite clear what this department is aimed to do, but fast forward two years and we can surely tell that this initiative is one of the most successful Community initiatives Magento ever took.