Magento Unconference 2016 – The Most Unique Magento Event

- E-Commerce, Fire development, Magento 2

Mage Unconference

Magento Unconference took place in Berlin during March 12 – 13. A key person behind Firebear, Victor, was there, and we’d like to share his thoughts below. Victor took part  in many Magento conferences, but this one impressed him most of all. “It was the most amazing Magento community event i’ve ever saw, so I want to share my recent impressions and details about MageUC16.”

The format of Unconference is absolutely unique in comparison with a typical Magento conference. For instance Meet Magento or Mage Titans are both awesome and everyone should attend them for sure, but MageUC provides entirely unique experience. The main difference of Unconference is the absence of agenda and speakers. During the first hours of the event, community members suggest topics and then people vote for ones they want to hear or discuss. A lot of topics are discussed in a form of brainstorm with some moderators, while others are prepared talks. And only the community chooses which of them deserve attention. Topics can be combined if similar – so new teams of speakers and moderators appear on the fly! After all topics are submitted – each author provides a short description on his or her subject and then the voting begins. Thus, the final event schedule is build on the basis of how the community votes.

Future of Magento 1

 


 

One of the most interesting talks and discussions of Unconference was about the future of Magento 1 after Magento will officially stop to support it. This will happens after 3 years and we as members of the Magento community will actually have to decide how the things will go afterwards. Lot of ideas have been generated in this brainstorm, and it seems that the community will continue supporting the old version of the platform by making a kind of fork. Migration to Magento 2 will take time, but still there will be a lot of customers who need security and compatibility updates aimed at Magento 1. Actually, two GitHub forks of Magento CE already exist on GitHub. Both are regularly supported, so you are welcome to use them and contribute to them! Furthermore, both versions include all recent security patches.

Magento Marketplace – new Magento Connect for Magento 2 extensions

As you might have guessed, Magento 2 has been discussed a lot during the whole two days of MUC. Everyone was very excited trying to get as much Insider information from Ben Marks as possible. People were asking about plans for the platform and especially about new Magento Marketplace. This is what we know:

  •  Very strict code quality control is an integral part of Magento Marketplace;
  •  Permanent bans for companies which try to publish stolen code with changed namespaces, etc;
  •  Avoiding of duplicated functionality: “You WON’T see 40 “Facebook Like”” @benmarks;
  •  The encryption of source code like IonCube will be allowed, but each vendor will have to provide an unencrypted version for various reviews;
  •  More close communication with extension development companies for collecting feedbacks and making the whole Magento ecosystem better;
  •  Current Magento Connect will stay separated from new Magento 2 Marketplace.

Magento 2 is our future

Cool topics by various speakers covered such interesting Magento 2 areas as “what is the best practice to setup environment for M2 extensions development,” “how to deploy Magento 2 to production,” “frontend workflow of M2,” etc.

Another great introduction to Magento 2 was performed by Peter Jaap who is running the Mage 2 Training project – a good starting point for everyone who wants to dive deep into Magento 2 with experts!

One of new things described in this talks was the usage of SHA256 encryption for store customer passwords on data base. Being a strong encryption method, it is used by default on Magento 2 instead of just MD5 hashing which we currently have on Magento 1. The good thing is that there are some open source tools by the Magento community which help developers enable SHA256 for Magento 1. And it is a good idea to implement the technology now on all your projects making the data base more ready for the Magento 2 update. And of course you will make the whole project more secure!
 


These are the tools:

Besides, there were a lot of of questions and discussions about a current state of Magento 2. Some sceptic thoughts have been shared, so it’s hard to say for sure when merchants should migrate to the new platform and when this will happen for the whole market. Although some thoughts on current production readiness and performance of Magento has been shared, one thing is absolutely clear – Magento 2 is the future of the platform and any Magento related specialist need to dive into it as soon as possible to be ready for new challenges and game changing things. Every month we get new Magento 2 extensions and templates, so the platform becomes more mature and merchants already accept it.

Open Source and community are two keys of success

There also was a lot of discussions dedicated to open source projects supported by the introduction of new tools. Andreas von Studnitz shared an amazing enterprise level free extension designed to resolve complex B2B tax issues:


 

During almost every talk on any topic some new tools and extensions developed by Magento community members and hackathon participants have been mentioned or introduced. This made the event truly amazing – together with new acquaintances and precise discussions on various important topics, attendants of Magento Unconference 2016 got a lot of amazing tools ready for production! It was really cool to meet so many open source enthusiasts and outstanding members of the Magento community in one place.

Another very important aspect of every Magento event – thanks to amazing Ben Marks – is the official Magento eyes and ears that are always listening to and looking after the community. Therefore, it is possible to share your feedbacks about Magento 2 with core developers and the management team of Magento building a better future of E-Commerce together!

 

Aside from technical and practical topics, the Magento community often tries to make things funny, and Unconference is not an exception. Fabian Blechschmidt in his amazing sarcastic (or not?:)) talk described how fucking up projects will help you complete the most advanced tasks.

 Magento Unconference

Full presentation is here: Fucking up projects – a manual

It is necessary to tell a big thanks to the team that made Mage Unconference possible. The amazing organisation, place, afterparty, and food were all used in the implementation of Unconference’s open minded ideas and concepts.

The Unconference team:

Sponsors

Looking forward to MageUnconference 2017?

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