On May 12 and 13, it was that time again. The German Magento community gathered for the annual Magento conference in Leipzig. Unfortunately, Magento Imagine in the US took place at the same time this year, which meant that very few official representatives from Magento itself attended. Given the importance of the German e-commerce market to Magento, that was a real shame overall. But now, on to the content...
Day 1
The first day began with a political statement from Rico Neitzel. Rico had been thinking about data protection and the online community, and encouraged us to reflect on privacy, surveillance, etc. I think everyone should form their own view or opinion here. Data protection affects everyone and, as Magento developers, it also affects our customers and their customers.
The following keynote by Arnulf Keese (PayPal) was very insightful and showed one possible direction for the e-commerce market. Many things were obvious to me, such as mobile commerce becoming increasingly important. Still, the figures presented were very interesting.
Magento - Half a Rush-Hour for Developer
The first developer talk kicked off with a massive dose of slides. Massive meant >100! Of course, that is a few too many slides, and not all of them could be shown. But I think Rico Neitzel and Fabian Blechschmidt already knew that and then placed the remaining slides in the Developer Barcamp on the second day.
Magento 2.0
Tobias Zander had taken a closer look at Magento 2 and presented all the key features, such as dependency injection and the new backend. An example module demonstrated some of the advantages for development. For all developers who had not yet worked with Magento 2, the talk provided a good introduction to the new system and its development. Particularly amusing were the photos of developers (with the appropriate facial expressions) at the announcement of the Magento 2 roadmap or other news. These were incorporated into the slides and documented the ups and downs between good and bad news about Magento 2.
PhpStorm - better, faster, more relaxed Magento development
Benjamin Wunderlich took on the PHPStorm IDE (which I have also been using for some time). He demonstrated live how quickly you can get results with PHPStorm and Magicento. He also encouraged learning shortcuts. I can fully agree with that. Good developers are always trying to optimize the way they work. That includes becoming better and faster with your IDE.
Code quality with Magento
Dr. Nikolai Krambrock and Andreas von Studnitz used examples to show how to recognize good code. They covered things such as metrics, version control systems, and source code comments. As we have come to expect from Andreas, the talk was very solid and well-founded. The two could not resist a little dig at extension developer Aitoc. I am not sure whether that belongs in a talk. Anyone using Magento will inevitably learn about extension developers who are not known for stable or performant code through the usual forums or word of mouth anyway.
Centralized logging with Magento
My meetup colleague Christoph Frenes gave an overview of different ways to introduce centralized logging. He talked about the advantages and various systems. A live demo showed how quickly Magento logs can be sent to a central log server such as Logstash, providing a better overview and better options for analyzing errors, especially when running a cluster.
After Shop Party
The After Shop Party was very good, as always. The Moritzbastei is simply a beautiful and cozy place that has made me very fond of Leipzig. Here too, as always, I had some very stimulating conversations over a glass (or two) of beer. A special greeting to Carmen, who has a great Magento blog of her own.
Day 2
One-page shops with Magento & AngularJS
The second day got off to a flying start. In his usual confident manner, Vinai Kopp showed how quickly a single-page app can be created with AngularJS. He was clearly taken with the possibilities AngularJS offers. What I personally always appreciate is that his talks also show source code.
Busted! The 9 1/2 worst performance myths in e-commerce
One of the best talks in my opinion came from Thomas Lohner. He exposed performance myths using nine examples. There were some new aspects here that I had not known about before. Some of his main points were: "Always test everything in conjunction with your own system" and "Do not just copy a few suggestions from random forums". There is certainly something to that. Sometimes people expect miracles from software that cannot be explained technically at all.
Developer Barcamp
The Developer Barcamp once again included some interesting topics. Jacques Bodin-Hullin showed his CLI tool "Installer", which lets you create modules, controllers, models, etc. very quickly in a kind of shell. He was also considering a Magerun integration. I will try the tool out when I get a chance...
Vinai explained how he developed a simple and understandable test framework for Magento himself and uses a kind of pseudo-dependency injection during development. Fittingly, I was then able to present my Magento 2 dependency injection backport for Magento. I have already published the slides at blog.muench-worms.de/wp-content/presentations/magento-di.
Controversial topics / Magento EE bashing / ebay
The talk "The Harsh Truth of Magento Enterprise" by Tim Bezhashvyly attracted particularly strong attention and discussion. Examples showed that most of the modules included with Magento Enterprise Edition can be added using free modules or third-party modules for less money. He concluded that a customer gets too little for $12,000 a year.
That may be technically correct, but in my opinion several things were not taken into account. For example, a shop operator running a large shop does not necessarily look only at price, but also at not being dependent on 20 different service providers or third-party module manufacturers. Imagine there is a problem with one of the added modules. It is not uncommon for one vendor to blame another. In such cases, getting everything from a single source is important. Important topics such as PCI compliance or warranty obligations were also missing from his talk.
I also cannot let the criticism of support for the Magento core stand as it is. In my view, support has improved over the last year as well, and you do receive patches from Magento for critical problems. That was not always the case in the past. My subjective impression here is that ebay places more emphasis on quality and stability and has set quite a few things in motion internally. I had to write this down for once, because otherwise all I read are negative reports about the ebay acquisition. There are certainly some points to criticize too. But not everything is bad, just as not everything is good.