Hey Reader,

A few days ago I sent you a bit of a teaser. Something about wiping the slate clean and building the one thing I wish existed: Magento 3.

Well.. here it is.

It's called Marko, and it's a brand new, truly modular PHP framework.

I know, I know -- "Mark built a framework" sounds like the punchline of an April Fools joke. But this one's real, and I've actually been building it for months behind the scenes, and it's my most significant contribution to open source since the release of docker-magento.

The short of it is that I took everything I've learned from working with Magento for 10+ years and compressed it down into the parts that actually work: true modularity, dependency injection, plugins, and events -- and rebuilt all of it from scratch.

No XML. No generated code. No cache gymnastics. Just clean code with modern PHP conventions.

I like to think of this as what the Magento architecture could become, if it didn't carry nearly 20 years of backwards compatibility along with it.

Here are a few things that make it different:

• Overrides with PHP attributes -- #[Preference], #[Before], #[After], #[Observer]. No di.xml. No config files to hunt down.
• Loud errors that teach -- every exception tells you what went wrong, where, and how to fix it. No more silent failures.
• Everything is a module -- your code, vendor code, ...even the framework. The same override system works everywhere.
• Pure PHP config -- no XML, no YAML. PHP is a first-class citizen.

​
If you want to see it in action, I put together an intro video that walks through the main aspects of the framework:

And if you want to dig into the code and docs:

Or GitHub:

This is version 0.1 -- it's early, and you're the first to hear about it. If you're a developer who's ever been frustrated by framework complexity, I would genuinely love your feedback.

More to come on this later. I have a lot to share about how I built a 17,000+ LoC framework all by myself, and how I believe it connects to where I think development is headed. But that's for next time.

Thanks for being here 🧡

Mark Shust Teacher / M.academy Say hi 👋 on LinkedIn & YouTube​