On February 22, our meetup met for the second time in 2017. At the moment, holding the meetup every six weeks is working quite well.
The meeting took place at my employer netz98 in Mainz. Unfortunately, attendance was a little lower because we are right in the middle of flu season. That was a real shame, especially considering that we had scheduled our first proper talk by a shop owner for that evening.
Deployment
We kicked things off with Silvan from Flexoptix. He showed us how the shop is deployed to the staging and production systems. His presentation focused on infrastructure. The subject of “deployment” has become quite extensive. Personally, I had expected it to be about deploying the Magento source code to the server. But that does not matter, because you cannot look at every aspect of a deployment in a single evening. After the talk, we discussed whether a simple shell script might be clearer, easier to follow, and sufficient compared with Puppet, Chef, Ansible, or Salt.
Following the deployment talk, at the attendees' request, we also got a look at the Flexoptix shop's frontend. Shops are rarely just off-the-shelf solutions. The software often contains industry-specific customizations. The Flexoptix shop also has a number of features that set it apart from its competitors. We discussed topics such as “Why we removed FactFinder again,” “Automating shipping notifications,” and caching technical information. It was also interesting to hear that, in some cases, customers in the USA can receive deliveries from a shop based in Frankfurt faster than from competitors in the USA.
Der erste Vortrag eines Shopbetreibers beim #magerm. Danke an @flexOptix. #realmagento pic.twitter.com/Ga6ohulqSR
— Christian Münch / muench.dev (@cmuench) February 22, 2017
While I am here, I would like to give a little plug to the new dev98.de blog and the deployment series by my colleague Matthias Walter.
Live Coding
The deployment topic was followed by the second topic, “In 20 minutes from 0 to ‘Hello world’ with Magento 2”.
The idea was for Fabrizio Branca and me to install a shop and build a module live to give people a good insight into Magento 2 development. At some point, the module would then be deployed to a server to demonstrate the complete development and deployment pipeline. Unfortunately, Fabrizio had also caught the flu. To avoid canceling the talk, I took over the first part (without deployment). Since only developers were there that evening, I did not rush through the topic in 20 minutes, but also showed a few “tricks” in PHPStorm. For example, many people do not know about the Magento 2 plugin. XSD code completion is not always familiar to everyone either.
By the end of the evening, we had created a small module that provides a controller with JSON output. We can expand the demo module at future events. The module has been published on Github.
https://github.com/magento-rheinmain/magento2-demo-module
Conclusion
All in all, it was a lot of fun again, as always. The next meeting in six weeks falls right during Magento Imagine in Las Vegas. We will see—perhaps we can arrange a live connection to Las Vegas from the AOE office.