Welcome to Atwix MageNews – March edition!
A recap of the most existing news that happened in Magento Community last month in our humble opinion: Magento 2.3.1, PWA, the Magento Association, collective community experience, thoughts, ideas and updates. Everything is in one place here, collected and brought to you with love.
So, without further ado, we are starting!

Hello and welcome to Atwix MageNews!
This article reviews the most interesting and important topics that popped up in Magento Community last month in our humble opinion.
Without further ado, let’s start!

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.

In order to add a custom layout handle to category page, a (basic) Magento 2 module with these additional files and their content is needed:

1. The events.xml file to “subscribe” to the event and say which observer should be fired ↵
2. An observer that adds a new layout handle to the page ↵
3. A layout file that adds needed changes to the page ↵

Recently Alex has listed what to expect from Magento Imagine 2018. What I am going to tell you today, is why Atwix team has never missed this event.

2017 has truly been the year of Community Engineering for Magento. For many years we’ve been hearing voices from the Magento community on how great would it be if we were allowed to work on fixing bugs and improving Magento core code… And now we’re living this dream. Moreover, this dream already delivers: 24% of the code shipped by Magento in 2017 came from the community. And all this came from 511 unique contributors. Impressive, isn’t it? And what’s helped the success?

20th of November, 2017, has marked an important date in Atwix history – we turned seven. It has always been a dilemma of what to do for the birthday celebration and we often followed a default and obvious way – making a party. This time though, we thought – what if?

A new Magento security patch SUPEE-10415 was released on November 28th of 2017. It adds some security enhancements to your store by changing more than 30 files. Let’s dive into the details of the code changes that the patch makes.

One of the biggest benefits of Magento is that its numerous out-of-the-box features can be easily extended with many more modules, created by Magento community. Although some extensions have an almost plug-and-play installation process, it’s much better to do it under control of a professional. We get requests for installing third-party extensions daily, and we accumulated a great experience of how to upgrade your website with new features while keeping it safe and high-performing. While there is no instruction to fit all different cases, here are some things to consider when installing new modules.

A new Magento 1 security patch SUPEE-10266 was released on September 14th of 2017. It closes the ability of an admin user remote code execution, protects from data leaks and fixes some minor issues. Let’s check the main code changes that are included in the patch.