Wow, it's already Spring!

I'm always amazed at how fast at how fast the second quarter of the year gets here.

At the end of each year, I typically do a lot of thinking and planning as to what I really want to do in the next year. And about this time, I reflect on this planning to make sure that I'm already significantly moving towards my end-year goal.

I'm SOOOO excited about quite a few things that I'm working on (more on that to come), and hope you are already making a lot of progress on some amazing initiatives for this year!

🌿 Is the grass always greener?

It's always interesting to hear about the "new" platform on the block. It's how we first discovered Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce... and all of those other platforms.

Another platform with a fairly big following is Shopware. While they are hardly the new kid in the block (their first release goes all the way back to the year 2000), the platform has become increasingly popular in Germany, and even managed to prune away some high-profile Magento talent over the last few years, including figures like Ben Marks (Magento's former lead evangelist).

I've personally kept 100% focused on Magento, because 1) I think the platform needs more high-quality educational content, 2) I love Magento, and 3) I don't like making rash decisions based on whatever is trendy at the moment.

It's now been a couple years since I've first heard about Shopware, and while they are growing in the Germany locale, it "feels" as though that Shopware has failed to gain significant market share in the United States, or really any other large market. It can take time for a platform to establish itself in new markets, so observing its growth and adoption over time is a wise approach.

Trends are usually short-lived. Just a few days ago, Hyvä talked about how they re-platformed from Shopware 6 to Magento in 12 weeks.

It's interesting to see a company move from Shopware to Magento, as you would think the common story we see playing out here is a move in the opposite direction 🤔

Topically, we could also look at a project like Hyvä, another platform that I've very much dragged my feet on adopting (that's changing!). But the trend is clear for Hyvä: it's up and to the right.

Substantial sites have migrated to Hyvä as their theme platform of choice, and reported huge productivity and performance gains in doing so.

As we can see even with this story, Hyvä is even bringing sites into the Magento ecosystem, and it feels as though the "popular" trend of moving away from Magento is starting to reverse, and firms that stayed "Magento positive" throughout this period are now reaping its benefits.

• What are your thoughts about all this?
• How do you feel about the Magento ecosystem today?
• Is it trending in the right direction?

And this is not at all a knock on Shopware -- it is an open-source, PHP-based eCommerce framework that has matured, which is all of the checkboxes that I look for when creating courses for new topics (so if it's in demand by you or your team, please let me know, as that is the last checkbox for me check! 😁).

🌼 What's coming in Magento 2.4.7

We aren't all that far away from the release of Magento 2.4.7, which is scheduled to be released on April 9 (just a few weeks away!).

I'll be making my typical Magento release YouTube video which covers all of the major updates, but here are a few things to look forward to:

🥳 Support for PHP 8.3 which includes support for all of the new language-level features, including completion of the type system with typed class constants, the #[\Override] attribute (which helps others know when a method has been overridden), a set of new classes, interfaces & functions, and much more.

⚛️ Improvements to the GraphQL layer including improvements to create cart mutations, support for canceling orders, expanded caching capabilities and improved parser performance.

🎸 A new Open Source metapackage which includes Adobe IMS integration, braintree and Payment Services.

🗂️ Indexing changes (community contribution) which help to batch products together to improve performance.

💽 Updated data object calls (community contribution) which resolves a bug with setData, which lead to an O(N) optimization with database calls.

✨ Many other bugfixes and updates as with every other Magento release!

Continue reading all about what's coming in the Magento 2.4.7 release notes and the recent community prioritization process update.

🧩 Vue Storefront is now Alokai

Naming your company after a platform is probably never a good idea (I'm looking at you, Mage-whatever agencies, ...working on Shopify sites! 😂).

I was very methodical in the naming of my company, as the M stands for both Magento and my name, Mark. Fifty years from now when Magento is a distant memory and I'm still chugging along with my courses (if I'm so lucky), I still won't need to change the name of my business.

Even though Vue Storefront is quite a popular project, their company name got them very much silo'd into the VueJS framework, and created a brand identify crisis when they released a ReactJS version of their software last year.

To solve this, they just announced that Vue Storefront is now Alokai!

I think a conducting a rebrand was a great idea for them, and actually love the name (and meaning) behind the Alokai name. This is just a friendly update that I thought you should be aware of, being that it has a popular Magento integration and all! 😁

And I'd also like to poll my readers -- have you ever used Vue Storefront or are looking to learn it? Reply back and let me know.

🐝 Beeline updates

I completely forgot to update my Beeline CHANGELOG for the last year! 😅

But I've added many other keywords and functionality to it over this last year to help you generate quality Magento code, and do so super fast.

If you aren't familiar with Beeline, when you type one of its keywords in PhpStorm, the entire contents of the file are populated for you, ...automatically.

And that's not the only part; it will fill out the appropriate namespace, class name, related attributes, nodes, etc. for you -- without you needing to do any of it. It'll even autocomplete suggested names for specific keywords and arguments to help guide you with proper naming conventions.

For example, if I type m2controller in a PHP file, it generates the ENTIRE controller class for me. And it does so by following all Magento's best practices! So I don't need to worry about the code extending an Action class (nope, it implements the ActionInterface), or whether I'll need to lint the entire file again after generating the file. And I never need to worry about it generating garbage code (<ahem>ChatGPT</ahem>).

Whenever I cover a new Magento topic in one of my courses, Beeline is also updated for that topic (for example, custom routers, which is a course that I'm currently working on right now 😉), so it just keeps getting better & better over time.

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🐳 docker-magento 45.1.0 was just released!

This includes updates to:

📌 Peg Composer at Magento's version number for increased compatibility

📊 An updated bin/docker-stats command to help you view the container status

🐧 A new bin/configure-linux command to help assist you with setup on Linux machines

🧓 A new bin/create-user command so you can easily create admin and customer accounts from the CLI

Get full release details in the CHANGELOG.

NEW LESSONS 🖥️

I just uploaded 3 new videos about how to set up the Magento code quality tools (PHPCS, PHPCSF, and PHPMD) with docker-magento.

I'll have an update about my premium course developments very shortly, but look forward to many lessons dropping about all of the various different Magento topics. This is a new initiative, and the related lessons will only be available to University students.

A question for you:

What’s your vision for where you want your Magento skills to be a year from now?

I hope you've enjoyed this issue of Segment! 👍

If you liked it, please share it with your Magento friends.
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