Meet Magento NYC 2018 Highlights

#MM18NYC pic.twitter.com/GrNIirGEZC

— Meet Magento NYC (@meetmagentonyc) November 1, 2018

First and foremost, we want to give a big Thank You to the individuals and businesses in the Magento Community who helped make this event happen. We’re thankful that the JetRails team was able to participate this year in order to learn, share, and collaborate with Magento merchants, agencies, and technology providers.

Leading into this event, we published an article about September and October 2018 Magento News. Having collected more information from sessions at Meet Magento NYC 2018 and from the community, we’ve put together some important news for you:

Deprecation of KnockoutJS

With the latest announcements about improvements to the Magento 2 frontend tech stack to include newer / better technology like Progressive Web Apps (PWA), the Knockout-frontend will eventually reach an End of Life (EOL). This was suggested by Anton Kril, Magento’s Director of Architecture. That is to say that for a time both will be supported; however, M2 merchants can eventually expect to need to rebuild their themes in order to update Magento as major versions are released. It’s likely that at some point it simply won’t make sense for Magento to continue supporting both frontend architectures.

Luckily, there is no EOL date for KnockoutJS yet. This will be important to keep an eye on, but the sky isn’t falling. By the time it is deprecated, we can hope that most M2 merchants will be ready for a redesign. It’s foreseeable that some merchants will be less than thrilled when that time comes, but it’s possible that they may also find that they can stay at a stable version of Magento 2 and only integrate security patches when that time comes, buying themselves time until they’re ready to redo their frontends.

The Magento Association

The old “Meet Magento Association” was disbanded, and a task force was created to lay the groundwork for a replacement organization. The task force appears to be near completion of their mission, and nominations to join the board of the new “Magento Association” are currently open. This should be one of the most influential bodies in the Magento ecosystem, helping to create and promote networking events, educational experiences, and a range of other support for the community. Stay tuned for updates as the new association gets off the ground.

Doubling Down on the Community?

At Meet Magento NYC, Matt Asay, Head of Developer Community at Adobe, spoke at length about the commitment of Magento to continue to support customers of all sizes as well as solution and technology partners. He described Adobe’s commitment to open source innovation and to the Magento community at large.

As a newer member of the Magento ecosystem, Matt was very aware of the need for the community to welcome new members. It has certainly been difficult for new players to “join the club” and be welcomed into conversations at Magento events or into relationships and partnerships in general.

However, when Matt’s Q&A time arrived at the end of his session, he was not prepared for some of the questions from the crowd (specifically from Karen Baker of ShipperHQ, a long-standing and well-respected member of the Magento community with a penchant for asking what’s on everyone else’s mind). As Magento strives to increase revenue, they’re continuing to compete head-on with paid partners and other long-term members of their community.

Hopefully, as folks like Matt become more aware of the concerns of the community, they’ll be in a better position to address some of these well-founded fears and concerns within the ecosystem. After all, Magento has already moved into arenas like shipping and payments. It’s hard for partners to invest in an ecosystem from which they may be muscled out, but those companies bring value to the Magento community at large. We’ll be sure to keep tracking this topic!

Magento 2.3

Magento 2.3.0 Beta is now available for download, and the general release is anticipated to happen over the next few weeks (most likely in November, although possibly later in 2018).

This new version includes 1800+ bug fixes, along with various security fixes and performance improvements. Magento is suggesting that these improvements have led to a 60%+ reduction in indexing times.

Page Builder, an enhanced system for managing the frontend content for those with less knowledge of coding, will be released in Beta to selected merchants, with an expectation of a general release in a future version of Magento 2.3.x.

We hope that if you’re interested in learning more about Magento 2.3 features and points of interest, that you’ll read our recent post that covers this topic in more depth.

Magento Innovation Lab Showcase (Round 2)

The Magento Innovation Lab has published their round 2 showcase. This includes some cool new features and functionality such as:

1) Search By Image: Improving the way that shoppers search for products

2) Payment Request API: A way to capture payments through a browser modal for a faster checkout process.

3) Transactional SMS: Sending transactional messages via SMS instead of ending up with junk messages in an email inbox.

As always, if you’d like to chat about your experiences with Magento or collaborate with our team of Magento Hosting Experts, please be in touch!

We hope you enjoyed the after-party. We will see you all tomorrow! #MM18NYC pic.twitter.com/rNFmF05Ruz

— Meet Magento NYC (@meetmagentonyc) November 2, 2018