The latest Magento news, a Head of Development’s experience
For this year’s Magento Live, we sent three representatives from Magium Commerce to cover the ground and bring news about the latest Magento developments. In this series, we will share our Magento Live 2018 Experience from three perspectives – software development, business development and marketing. As our first respondent, Daniel Woolfson, the Head of Development & Test at Magium Commerce, describes his experience of Magento Live 2018, from a development perspective.
“I attended Magento Live 2018 with Magium Commerce in Barcelona, Spain between 8th and 10th October. Magium Commerce is a Magento Partner and as such we built on our relationships with the Magento technical leadership team to understand what could be possible with the latest features of Magento.
Hearing about the new focus of “experience driven commerce” summed up perfectly the synergy between Magento and Adobe from the keynote by Shantanu Narayen (CEO of Adobe) and Mark Lavelle (SVP, Commerce, Magento). This new relationship has manifested itself to our technical team as an Adobe Experience Platform Connector extension – available now.
My main focus of attending as Head of Development & Test at Magium Commerce was to evaluate the latest features of Magento 2.3, amongst which are the following:
- PageBuilder
- PWA Studio
- Multi Source Inventory (MSI)
- GraphQL
- Declarative Database Schema
- Import / Export improvements
- Google ReCaptcha
- Message Queue moved to OpenSource
- Asynchronous API
- Two Factor Authentication
- And over 1000+ issues fixed!
In particular I would like to state the opportunities which we can now offer our clients using a PWA experience. To have a desktop experience on or offline on a mobile device is a great opportunity to maximise on conversions for users who choose to use mobile. In the longer term the gap is closing on user experience differences between mobile and desktop – and Magento is at the forefront of enabling Solution integrators like Magium Commerce pass these major technology leaps to their clients.
Brian Green, the Head of EMEA Sales at Magento, an Adobe Company, pointed out the importance of Europe for Magento development. 51% of global certifications of Magento are residing in Europe. 60% of Magento 2 certifications have been acquired by developers residing in Europe. 11 of 20 Magento Masters and 30 of 50 Top 50 Contributors are residing in Europe.
It is comforting to know that Magento still has a focus on Magento OpenSource and the extended Magento engineering community. We were informed that 56% of all code was delivered in 2018 on the OpenSource platform. Many of the above new features in V2.3 are from the wider community which shows the respect which the Magento Engineering team have for the open source Developers.
The highlights of the many high-quality breakout sessions I attended were:
- Implementing a Project effectively on Magento Commerce Cloud
- The State of Progressive Web Apps
- The Road to PWA
- Open EcoSystem: API Roadmap & Community Engineering
- Magento 2 Performance
- Magento Innovations Lab – Everything you need to know
- “GraphQL – Mind your P and your QLs”
Thank you to the Magento Team for such a warm welcome and a thank you to the Magento Team for such a warm welcome and a great landing pad for technical minds :-)”
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