Introduction

2021 was the second year in a row that businesses worldwide faced challenges born of Covid, and heightened by subsequent lockdowns. Many merchants realized they needed digital transformation, and fast. Some would choose to go fully online, while others pursued a hybrid model. 

New challenges led to market adaptation through new tools –  like live video shopping – and brought new players to the eCommerce ecosystem.

In this year-end edition of MageNews, we’ll revisit some of the best moments of 2021 from the world of Magento Open Source, Adobe Commerce, and eCommerce at large.

April 2021 experienced much in the way of eCommerce news and announcements, no more so than Adobe Commerce’s ecosystem. Breaking news to cover this month: Magento Commerce rebranding to Adobe Commerce, Adobe Summit 2021 connected 1,000s of us, Partner ecosystem product expansions centered on improved customer experiences, speeding up the purchase process, and scaling a merchant’s offerings and reach. Let’s check out what Atwix Partners brought us in April!

With Magento Community Engineering signed off and now pressing ahead with Magento 2.5, Adobe released Magento Commerce and Open Source 2.4.2. This latest release is powerful. It has numerous security fixes, performance improvements, and additional features. The Atwix team studied up on all the changes and has unpacked into small logical pieces for you. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy Magento 2.4.2 Release Overview!

2020 is nearly complete. The holiday season is now well underway. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone. End of year holidays remain in front of us. Even though we have a few more weeks left, this year will clearly be remembered as one unlike any. In reality, this year felt more like a decade than it did a year. For good reason. New norms were instantly forced on all of us. Impacted by a global pandemic and rapid economic change, ongoing uncertainty and instant pivots in market consumption trends, user behaviors, and general working norms — in 2020 we all experienced much and it changed how we now live our personal and professional lives.

Quality Assurance is a crucial part of any development process before the deployment. It is important to be able to find new types of bugs, which are often quite unpredictable. Better preventing the issue than solving it. For that, there is a great tool – Exploratory Testing.

What is Exploratory Testing? Why do I need it and how will Exploratory Testing help me? This article will answer these questions no matter what your role is – QA Engineer, Developer, Designer, or Business Analyst.

To state the obvious, we have experienced dramatic and rapid change in our industry for eCommerce retailers and the 2020 year-end holiday shopping season will be very different from any other previous year — in terms of traffic, delivery, security. To keep pace with our customers, we must stay informed, adapt, and bring our best quality solutions… quickly. And we will!

In just few days we will rock Magento Community with the largest technical conference in the world – MageCONF 2020.  5 tracks and dozens of presentations on trending Magento news delivered by speakers from all over the world – all just one click away! We have news both for developers, PMs, QAs and companies’ management! Make sure you register and join us online on October 24th!

Welcome to the 21st edition of MageNews. 🎃

Being the new editor of Atwix’s monthly news digest — MageNews — is a great honor and responsibility. My hope is to build on the practical value my predecessor delivered. Our goal remains the same — to monitor and surface key drivers and highlights taking place in our incredible Magento ecosystem. We look to provide MageNews in an easy to read format. Ultimately, we want to further community knowledge and engagement by helping inform developers, merchants, and partners across the Magento world.

Let’s start!

– Alex Lunkov

Some would say, The Magento community is one of the largest and most active e-commerce communities in the world. It unites engineers and business professionals across the globe. We start this series of articles on the Magento community focused on the inner workings of the community: maintainers, contributors and community engineers. Featuring stories from people who help build the community as we know it, we want to highlight the hidden aspects of the daily routine and make the Magento community even more transparent.

Welcome to 20th edition of MageNews. 🎉

It’s been quite a while since we decided to create this digest. MageNews has gone from a simple idea to a full project with a commitment to deliver the most important and exciting Magento news each month.

Our goal is to make this wrap-up useful for every tier in Magento community, both technical and non-technical people, our merchants, partners and a lots of friends from Magento community. A lot of you have already got used to it, hopefully, love it and are happy to be notified about a brand new post every month.

For me, it’s been a tradition now to end my month with reviewing the latest news, defining information and briefly describing what happened. Of course, the best part is the joy from being able to help others to learn more. 🙌

With my recent decision to take a sabbatical and step away from my daily responsibilities we have decided that MageNews must go on! Alex Lunkov, our Business Analyst, will be preparing MageNews for you as of October.

As for me, I’m going to start a new journey and switch focus to other things. No matter what –  Magento will always have a special place in my heart.

Onward and upward, everyone. 🚀

– Roman