Recap: Meet Magento 4.10

After I’ve missed this summer’s Meet Magento 3.10, I was really looking forward to catching up with the Magento family and listening to some interesting presentations and workshops.

It’s a Git world

The week started with a Git workshop which was hosted by Lee Saferite and Vinai Kopp. It turned out to be a day packed with information regarding the various uses of this versioning system and how it could be used to keep track of Magento developments. The venue was well chosen, about 10 people were sitting in a circle, trying to follow the complex subject. Catering was also very good, so it turned out to be a nice event with lots of ideas and interesting discussions during the class and in the breaks. The day was rounded off by a visit to a local bar named SPIZZ, giving everybody the chance to say hello and reconnect.

On the following day, Meet Magento 4.10 opened its gates to about 450 guests. In a short keynote Rico Neitzel, Community Manager Germany for Magento and co-organiser of this event, gave some general information and also took a look into the past. Meet Magento has seen an impressive growth in the past two years, beginning with about 100 people in the spring of last year and now having more than tripled this number. He then introduced Roy Rubin, CEO of Magento Inc. as Mr. Magento and left the audience excited to see what the guest from California had to say to them.

Where’s Magento at?

Unfortunately, his keynote was disappointing. More than the usual rundown of who Magento Inc. is, how the company has developed in the past months, which opportunities there are for merchants and how, in his words, Magento is on its way to become the Google of eCommerce (!) could not be gathered from his presentation. As for ECT (education, certification and training) he said that an initiative would start in December, but unfortunately this was all the details he wanted to share at this point. Also no words about the roadmap for the coming Magento versions. Roy Rubin emphasised more than once how important the community was and is for Magento’s success and will be in the centre of attention. Why then, especially the developers wondered, did only Roy Rubin and Michel Goossens (Vice President & GM of EMEA) make it across the Atlantic? Why weren’t they joined by the new international community manager Rhonda Rondeau to connect with the community? And why did not a technical person join the Magento delegation to give members of the developing community the chance to get rid of their most pressing questions? Surely everybody was aware that with the rapid growth of the Magento ecosystem it becomes increasingly harder for the important people to free some time and take the trip to Europe. And with the ZendCon taking place at the same time, this was even harder. But why not say exactly that? Why not share a note/video, where a core developer said something like “sorry we cannot catch you guys live this time, but we are superbusy finalising the 1.5 CE, which will have some major speed improvements …”. This is the kind of transparency that has been missing lately, and I think that Magento Inc. should not underestimate the signalling effect of what they do – or don’t do – at those types of conferences.

After this keynote, I was trying to catch as much of the conference and the people involved as possible, switching between the main conference venue – where the business themes were presented – and the upper floors, where speakers concentrated on the technical side of things.

Mobile and Security

In my talk on Mobile Commerce (the slides of which can be found on Slideshare), I concentrated mainly on the pros and cons of native apps vs. apps and which data layers Magento offers to let external applications interact with it. With regard to Magento Mobile, I had a few things to say and further outlined the view that I had described in a previous post (Will Magento mobile rock the App store?). My conclusion: native apps only make sense if they need the devices’ core functionalities; Magento mobile offers native apps that provide no additional value when compared to web apps.

Another very interesting talk was given by Lee Saferite (the aforementioned master of Git); his aim was to raise awareness for software security with regard to the Magento code base. In his experience, shop owners and software developers alike don’t pay enough attention to making sure that source code from external parties is checked thoroughly. People readily download extensions from MagentoConnect while not knowing precisely whether they are introducing bugs or even security issues. He then mentioned a security hole that affects all Magento versions prior to 1.4, which has not yet been fixed even though he has made the core team aware of it. Unfortunately, nobody from Magento Inc. was in the audience to provide an explanation for this.

… and the rest

Conference day #1 was followed by a great aftershow party at the Moritzbastei. Thanks to the sponsors, drinks and food were on the house – need I say more?

The second conference day started a little later, and I arrived just in time to catch Martin Rothenberger’s excellent talk about DailyDeal‘s technical set-up. His conclusion: caching, caching, caching and loading Magento only if it’s really necessary.

After that I listened to various Barcampers, discussed developers’ stuff and caught people I had only met on Twitter or Skype before.

As for the conference itself: thanks to [netresearch] and Rico for – again! – pulling off such a great event: amazing venue (museum meets classroom meets conference hall), great catering and superb aftershow party! Looking forward to MM5 next year!

(Image: pexels.com)

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8 Antworten auf Recap: Meet Magento 4.10

1. Tobias Vogt sagt: 09.11.10 um 08:42 Great article Roman. Stan on!
2. Vinai sagt: 09.11.10 um 08:50 Thanks Roman, I think you conveyed the feeling me and many other developers had. Looking forward to a response from Magento Inc.
3. Nick Weisser sagt: 10.11.10 um 08:31 Growing from 100 to 200 employees from January through November 2010 is not an easy task. I have great respect for that and think that Magento is still giving back a lot to the community, although more transparency would definitely help to motivate developers even more.
4. Chris sagt: 10.11.10 um 15:44 Sounds like a great conference. We use git in our office and I definitely agree with Martin Rothenberger’s conclusion on caching. That’s why we had to develop our own whole-page caching solution called “Lightspeed” (no connection to the popular web server) to bring CE up to speed with EE.Check it out: http://www.tinybrick.com/magento-modules/performance/improve-magentos-slow-performance.html/
5. Pingback: Meet Magento #4 – der erste Tag | magelounge