Looking back on Magento Imagine 2018
Every year, Magento hosts its Imagine event in Las Vegas, where implementation partners, e-commerce managers, and technology partners catch up on everything happening in the Magento world. This year’s theme was “Leading the Charge.” Days are mostly devoted to keynotes on the biggest developments, alongside several tracks with a wide variety of sessions. Each day wraps up with food and drinks, followed by a networking reception. In total, more than 3,000 people from over 60 countries attended.
Magento Community
The Magento Community has always been large, strong, and close-knit. What stood out at Imagine 2018 was how fully Magento itself now embraces it. Mark Lavelle, CEO of Magento, made this clear in his keynote: “Magento is not an open-source company, Magento is an open collaboration company.” This shift started last year under Lavelle’s leadership with the creation of the Magento Community Engineering Team. Today, 25% of all Magento code comes from the community. Magento is also experimenting with building new features and improvements together with the community. Examples include the Multi Source Inventory project and adding support for PHP 7.2, with the community actively involved in development. This is what makes Magento a truly unique e-commerce platform. No other platform in the world enjoys such broad support and so many contributions. For store owners, the result is a lower total cost of ownership: they benefit from ongoing updates and new features without having to set aside extra budget of their own.
Magento Association and Community Insider Program
Building on this, Magento announced the Magento Association. In short, all activities of the former Meet Magento Association are moving to Magento itself, so Meet Magento events around the world will now be backed by Magento’s knowledge and marketing resources. The goal is to have the Magento Association fully launched by the end of the year.
Magento is also expanding its partner program with the Community Insider Program. It gives individual developers and small agencies direct access to Magento tools and resources, helping them build their knowledge and skills and grow their businesses. Participants also get a clear path to move up from the Community Insider Program to become Solution and Technology Partners.
Magento Masters
During the keynote at the Magento Imagine conference in Las Vegas, Magento CEO Mark Lavelle presented awards to the Magento Masters. Our CEO and founder, Danny Verkade, is one of them. Watch the Magento Masters Award ceremony at Imagine.
The next Magento release
The next version of Magento, 2.2.4, will be released on May 2. It’s a small release focused mainly on performance improvements and bug fixes, which makes upgrading a must for store owners. After all, research has shown a clear link between speed and conversion rate.
Magento 2.3
Magento 2.3 will also arrive later this year. This larger release comes packed with new features. Read all about the new features in Magento 2.3
Progressive Web App (PWA)
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) came up again and again at Imagine 2018. The expectation is that this technology will become the next big trend, just as responsive design did a few years ago. Progressive Web Apps are a serious competitor to native apps. They’re faster, more secure, and cheaper to build, yet they still offer the same functionality as a native smartphone app. Because they’re faster, they also improve conversion rates and keep visitors on the website longer. Magento’s advice is to start investing in PWAs today, even though not all the technology and standards are known yet.
Want to learn more about the developments discussed at Magento Imagine 2018, or talk through one of these topics? Get in touch with me.
