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Magento Association Connect – Spring 2022 Edition – review
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Magento Association Connect – Spring 2022 Edition – review

Last week we have experienced a great event of Magento Community and Adobe Company focused on the actions accomplished already and planned for the future in Magento development. 

Lots of interesting presentations and discussions took place. Magento Association’s new Board Members election result was announced. Congratulations to Sonal Puri as a new Board Member. Thanks for the explanation on the short and long-term support of Magento projects, which were worked out in the Adobe and Magento Community cooperation. 

Magento fork MageOS community initiative was discussed during the Magento Open Source pannel. We could also hear the results of Hyvä Themes’ implementations and advantages over Luma.  Willem Wigman described its growth and plans for the future. 

And a lot more issues like cross Border Ecommerce – Benefits with Adobe Commerce, and Magento optimisation for Google. Let’s revise some of them.

Adobe keynote for Magento 

Starting from Eric Erway and Nicole Cornelson’s keynote. They presented Adobe’s strong support for Ukraine as a victim of the violent war from the Russian side. 

They’ve also shared some statistics showing Magento Community and Adobe engagement in Magento code releases. 

The schedule of Magento Open Source codebase features and security patches released in 2022 was presented. This year we have two releases left in August and October with pre-releases in July and September. 

All actions undertaken by Adobe and Magento Association have a mutual goal of making a significant difference and improvements for all-size e-commerce businesses. 

Magento Association Board elections

A MA Board of Directors consists of 6 members. Till the last week, there was 3 vacant place for other members. One of them was revealed in direct elections and announced during the MA Connect on the 7th of June. 

As Sonja Franz from MA announced a new MA Board member became Sonal Puri, Webscale CEO. Congratulations on direct elections winning. 


Two other members will be selected in slate elections which will begin in June. The results will be announced in August/September. 

Magento Open Source vs Adobe Commerce 

There was a panellist discussion on the Magento Association and Adobe activity on Magento Open Source’s future and current management issues. The participants from Adobe and Magento Associations presented their points of view starting from development work, and merchant issues, to Adobe’s large company perspective.

Magento Open Source development approaches 

The community and Adobe decided to practice in the everyday cooperation the STS (Short Term Support) and LTS (Long Term Support) strategies. As was explained by Damien Retzinger a member of Task Forces.

Short Term Support – is dedicated to shorter life cycle Magento projects, which in practice means packages on the top of Magento repository, additional ones, and wholly community-owned. These are supplemental packages on the top of the Magento technology stack. Potentially we can assume more frequent releases here. As well as a more agile approach. 

Long Term support – while long life cycles are predicted for 3-5 years of working time. It is about the main Magento repository managed by Adobe. Less frequent releases are expected and less agile actions are possible here. The technology stack is more stable.

The big question was how to move issues between STS and LTS. Is it possible and necessary to transfer projects between different approaches?

Mage OS makes a difference

Vinai Kopp one of the panellists is also an initiator of the Magento fork called Mage OS. The idea here is to make a mirror of the Magento repository – and allow to create mirrors for everyone else who is interested. 

To maintain the Magento technology stack in good shape and accessible for developers, no matter what may happen in the future. Mage OS tends to be a kind of safeguard for all business runners resting on Magento, e.g. merchants and developers. With Mage OS may be sure the code is secure and will survive independently from meta-level business decisions.

Magento Open Source is a matter of trust

Laura Folco and Ryan Hoerr admitted that all community initiatives like  Magento Association and Mage OS are perceived as building trust for the Magento Open Source as a product and technology they can build their business future on. 

There is an overall agreement that the market can be shared between Adobe Commerce and Magento OS, having the same code source and appealing to the separated segments of clients. And as long as all sides have a mutual interest in Magento development the cooperation will bring profits to all stakeholders.  

Hyvä the game changer

Hyvä’s impact was felt across at this year’s MA Connect event with at least 2 interesting presentations we followed. The first was from a frontend developer’s perspective practising Hyvä in everyday work, while another one highlighted Willem Wigman – creator of Hyvä Themes as well as an explanation about what makes up his ecosystem.

How Hyvä makes developers happy

In her talk, Anastasja Bondar discussed the benefits of using the Magento frontend based on Hyvä Themes. She was really enthusiastic about this particular theme and had worked with it for several months already! What’s more, is that she noted how much time can be saved when developing sites using this flexible and fast Magento template from Hyvä.

Anastasja highlighted that Hyvä impacts e-commerce performance improving it if compared to the Luma Theme, especially from the Core Web Vitals perspective. We share this point of view and have the same experience. 

Hyvä Themes performance advantage over Luma

She compared Luma and Hyva Product Pages and showed the number of requests for Luma 208 and for Hyvä 17! With Luma page loads 5,97 sec. vs Hyvä 1,22 sec. All Core Web Vitals Google metrics: LCP – Large Contentful Paint, FID – First Input Delay, and CLS – Cumulative Layout Shift proved Hyvä Themes’ huge advantage over Luma. 

For more information on Magento optimisation with Hyva themes please look at our Ebook.

Hyvä checkout on React over Luma

Anastazja presented some interesting tips and hints on Hyvä start and documentation. She also pointed out another comparison between Hyvä and Luma checkouts. Which is an additional reason why Hyvä is a game-changer and shows that Hyvä Theme was only a beginning of a wider ecosystem which is now being created. 

Hyvä is more than just a theme for Magento 2

Hyvä has been making waves in the industry lately, it’s been a year since it was launched in February 2021. Willem Wigman presented Hyvä so far achievements and plans for the future. 

Hyvä was a vision for Magento simplicity and lightweight, starting from the Hyva Themes based on community engagement. It has been made by developers who want to work faster and more efficiently to deliver a business edge in Magento e-commerce worldwide!

Hyvä Community and Growth

Here are some interesting numbers showing the growth scale. Hyvä builds a culture of positive collaboration and support with:

  • 1950 people gathered on Slack,
  • 164 extensions made during the first year of existence, 
  • 300+ Agencies working with Hyvä,
  • 782 sites build on Hyvä Themes worldwide according to Buildwith.com,
  • in 45 countries

Hyvä’s Ecosystem

Future plans are focused on building a consistent ecosystem of themes, tooling, and community. Hyvä focus on appreciating partnership, with tutorials and technology stack with a really low learning curve. 

From the Panda Group perspective, we need to highlight the benefits coming from saving time and money for developing customizable Magento e-commerces. Which makes them cheaper and easier for commercialisation. 

Conclusion

To sum up the event we have to admit a lot of movement has been made lately on the various levels. Initiatives like Magento Association, Mage OS and Hyvä look promising for the future. 

At Panda Group we support strongly all initiatives to maintain and improve the Magento quality and make the technology powerful in favour of our customers’ interests. We usually work on long-term projects and are used to develop solutions with years to come perspective. 

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