Magento Developer’s Paradise Summary

I just arrived back in the US after a long weekend at the Magento Developer’s Paradise. We (David Alger and myself) had a great time at the event (see photos of the event below). There were a number of different types of attendees: Magento Professional & Enterprise development companies, extension development companies (like Webshopapps.com and Sweet Tooth), freelance developers, and Magento team members. We had the opportunity to meet with a number of the European partners (Netresearch,Icommerce,Inchoo, et al) and other developers to share ideas on how to successfully build Magento projects.

Yoav Kutner kicked off the conference with a keynote Sunday morning. Here are some bullet points from his speech:

• Magento is the fastest growing e-commerce platform in the world.
  • “Magento” is searched for more often than “Ecommerce” on Google
  • Has been downloaded over 2.5 million times
  • Over 65K merchants are using Magento
    • This stat has been on the Magento website for a while, but I always wondered how this number was derived: I asked Yoav if Magento pinged any server to notify that it was installed at a certain address and he said that it did not, which is fantastic from a privacy perspective. The only way that Magento Inc. knew the urls of the 65K+ sites is that the admin panel in Magento is setup to check with the Magento servers to see if there are any updates/notifications that should be displayed to the admin user. The list of all urls that have requested updates from the updates RSS feed were culled down to a list of publicly accessible domains and then were tested to ensure that they were an actual Magento site.
  • It’s been estimated that over $25 billion has been transacted through the Magento platform.
  • 2.4 million extension downloads
  • 350+ active developers for Magento Connect
  • 180+ solution partners – 55% of these are in Europe
• Magento is being used on continually larger projects – some Magento sites are nearing the $1B/yr revenue mark.
• Magento Community 1.4.2.0 is planned for release in early November. This will be a maintenance release that will resolve 450 issues.
• Magento Community 1.5 Roadmap – CE 1.5 is currently slated to have the following features (subject to change):
  • Order composite products in admin
  • Edit order without creating a new one
  • Custom order statuses (this is currently possible by adding an xml node in a config.xml file of a custom module, but 1.5 will allow you to manage order statuses via the admin)
  • Multistep checkout with no Javascript
  • Improved import functionality (note: the uRapidflow extension currently enables these features, plus more)
    • Product types supported:
      • Simple
      • Virtual
      • Grouped
      • Configurable
      • Gift Card
    • All types of attributes will be supported
    • Support for different values per scope
    • Support for custom options
    • Support for tiered pricing
• Magento Enterprise 1.9.2 is planned for release in mid October (this will also just be a maintenance release) and 1.10 is planned for release at the end of the year. Magento 1.10 planned roadmap:
  • Gift wrapping
  • CDN/DB as alternative image storage
  • Support for MSSQL and Oracle databases
• There are over 700 Magento Enterprise users

Some notes from the other talks at the conference:

• Magento Connect – Jonathan Beri talked about upcoming features in Magento Connect 2.0. Some of the things that are planned for 2.0:
  • The option for Magento developers to sell modules directly within Magento Connect
  • The ability to sell a module as a subscription, instead of a one-time purchase
  • More advanced sorting/filtering options
• Magento Extensions for the Cloud/Saas – Jonathan Beri also talked a little bit about the OpenSocial extension infrastructure they are planning for the Saas solution they are building. Jonathan previously worked for Myspace where they use OpenSocial for their extension infrastructure.
• Performance – Dima Soroka gave a great presentation on Magento performance optimization. You can review the slides from his presentation here: http://j.mp/98mlR8
• Debugging with PDT+xdebug – I gave a quick presentation on the importance of using a robust IDE (PDT, Zend Studio, Netbeans) with debugging capabilities. You can read a blog post I wrote a while back on how to enable rich error and exception backtraces here: http://bit.ly/co1qc4. Yoav mentioned that some members of the Magento development team have recently started using PhpStorm (http://bit.ly/dbxhkq).

Thanks to Thomas, Annemarie, and others at Netresearch.de for the great job you did at hosting the event.