You know by now what happened at Meet Magento 2015 in Cluj, and what the event had to offer to those attending the business track. And we will make no further reference to the party 🙂 But we were there attending the technical talks, all eyes and ears, to learn what’s new in the Magento community.
The developer track was not lacking news, as Magento Evangelist Ben Marks announced a quarterly features release, explaining how the upgrade should be done. He has mentioned that the releases will be done based on an announced roadmap. According to Ben, modules can no longer be installed by a non-technical person, as each of them will have to be installed using Composer, therefore shared hosting would not be a good solution for future Magento 2 shops.
Later on, Silvian Cretu explained why to use Chef and how useful and easy is to be able to reproduce the production environment in development. His presentation was more an introduction for his workshop next day – Cooking with Chef in Amazon AWS. He was followed by Igor Bondarenko, who explained the steps necessary to test a Magento module.
Amasty’s Val Hrykyan had a tips and tricks session on how to debug a Magento website for cases when clients don’t allow access to servers. He has also described some “home-made” tools that can be used to debug clients’ issues.
Andrii Semenenko, who is in charge with the Magento 2 checkout development, has presented the features of the new and simplified checkout module. Customers can simply check off if their billing address is the same as their shipping address, resulting in a faster checkout process due to the fact that customers don’t have to fill in their information twice. The new checkout consist in only 2 steps and has been designed for driving more conversions and a better user experience.
Marius Strajeru demonstrated that Magento 2 isn’t 100% decoupled, but he managed to disable most of the components and to build a CMS on top of the Magento core. Interesting workshop in the second day of the event, as well!
Constantin Bejenaru exposed a great implementation of a Full Page Cache module that it’s directly integrated in NGINX with MemCache. The benchmark made showed better results compared with any existing solution.
The first day ended with two interesting presentations by Radu Chelariu and Dan Homorodean. Radu made a comparison between the old websites where the accent was on pixel perfect implementations, glossy buttons and complicated layouts to the modern websites where the most important is the usability, user experience and responsive design. Dan closed the day with an up-to-date catalog search solution for Magento, using Apache Solr and Elasticsearch. The Magento instance presented showed a very capable full-text searching with great interface and scalability.
Meet Magento is a great event to be at, for both the information and the fun. Even if you are usually involved in the community and up-to-date with latest trends, it’s a good opportunity to meet and discuss face-to-face, at a more focused, faster pace. And Cluj is always great to visit. See you next year!
