layout: true <div class="slide-heading"></div> <div class="slide-footer"> <span>Imagine 2017 review by Jisse Reitsma (Yireo)</span> </div> --- class: center, middle, world, bgimage # Imagine 2017 ## Review by Jisse Reitsma ??? Hi everybody, welcome to this screencast on Imagine, the yearly international Magento conference that took place last week (early April) in April. Before we start I have to apologize for my voice a bit, which is a little rusty - not because of partying, but because of a cold I caught in Las Vegas. --- class: orange # Imagine 2017 -- - Community bits ??? So let's start. Imagine had a lot of things to offer, some really oriented on the community. There were announcements on new products & services, mainly on the last 3rd day of Imagine. I really wanted to take this opportunity to share some of my thoughts on these products. Also, there is some news on Magento 2.2. And, finally, because I'm a developer, there is some techtalk as well. -- - New products & services -- - News on Magento 2.2 -- - Techtalk --- # Community bits -- - PreImagine & other parties ??? So the community was vibrating. For instance, the PreImagine party, sponsored by ShipperHQ, it offered a great way to meet existing friends and make new friends. Besides PreImagine, there were many more other great parties - simply showing that Magento people like to party. -- - Magento Masters ??? Another part of the community was awarding various people in the community who did great work to help Magento move forward. I'm proud to be a Magento Master as well, but it was even greater to meetup with the other masters. -- - Diversity in Tech ??? I'm picking just a few topics, but one noteworthy talk, or actually a panel discussion, was on diversity in tech - a session which discussed the ways that woman specifically can get a better chance to evolve within the tech industry. It was a great session. And I especially loved the involvement of Alaina Percival who represented the organization "Woman Who Code". Agree or disagree, it is an important topic and shows how the Magento community matures. --- # New products & services -- - Magento Security Scanner ??? Moving on, some products and services were announced throughout Imagine. First of all, the Magento Security Scanner was revealed, currently in beta. It will allow for a report to be created for your specific Magento instance. Technically, this involves an automated login through SSH, making it an internal scan and not an external scan like the great MageReport tool created by the guys of Hypernode. I signed up for the beta, and am curious how this will come to be. -- - Magento Social ??? Magento Social was announced as well: Kind of a Facebook app for product listings, targetting specific customers, ad campaigns, etcetera. Really useful for merchants who want to promote their products via social channels. -- - Magento Advanced CMS (aka BlueFoot) ??? Bluefoot was aquired some time ago already, so this was not really big news. However, it should be noted that Magento has now labeled it Magento Advanced CMS. Bluefoot contains already awesome features like content templating, ease-of-use so that no frontend developer is needed. And upcoming versions will also bring a more advanced media gallery. -- - Magento Business Intelligence ??? Another product is BI: A completely separate app, which contains reporting, graphics, data mining on a variety of topics. I've not seen much of its details yet, but I can imagine that its values lies in its ability to aggregate data in an easy way. Very interesting. -- - Magento Shipping (aka Temando) ??? Last but not least came the announcement of Magento Shipping - an integrated solution via shipping methods like Fedex UPS. It allows to generate picking lists, has a nice integration in backend. The solution is based on a third party called Temando. And fair to say, there are more similar solutions out there, ShipperHQ being one of them. Most of the features are meant - as I understand it - for Magento Enterprise, either in the cloud or on your own server. And if I have to play the devils advocate, I could point out that all of these new products, except for the Magento Security Scanner, seem to be refurbishments of existing solutions that are simply integrated now with Magento. It might be great, but it still feels that a lot of these products require a healthy competition from the community. --- # Magento 2.2 news -- - B2B features (EE only) - Corporate accounts; Organizational chart; ACLs - Request quote; Requisition Lists - Quote overview with quote status - Personalized catalogs with discounts ??? Moving on, there was news on Magento 2.2. Well, ok, some of the things we already knew: Magento 2.2 will ship with various B2B features - only for the Enterprise addition though. There are various cool features in there, like corporate accounts, wishlists for B2B (aka requisition lists) and quote status handling. However, this is not new! -- - More bug fixes - Fixing GitHub issues ??? Also something that we knew was that numerous open issues on GitHub will be solved and integrated in 2.2 - allowing for many bugs to be fixed. This will make Magento 2 a lot more stable for sure. The big question is then still: When? When will 2.2 be released? The current answer is somewhere in the summer. -- - <span class="label">ETA </span><span class="value">Summer 2017</span> --- # TechTalk -- - Extension Quality Program ??? During the conference, there was talk on the Extension Quality Program as it is used by Magento Marketplace, to check extensions for common issues. There is a EQP tool available on GitHub. However, it includes only some common tools like composer checks and PHPSniffer rules. There was especially talk on more advanced rules, like checking if the Object Manager was used in a wrong place or whether a module was using a repository properly. This is something for the future, and definitely the community could help out here. -- - UIComponents ??? During various talks on UIcomponents, best practices were discussed - for instance during a round-table at the DevExchange session on the last day. Also, there was talk of a possible refactoring of RequireJS to WebPack, which could allow for a bit more flexibility. There is much more to say on this topic, and we hope to see some kind of online DevExchange soon. -- - DevBox ??? The DevBox was discussed - the docker-based solution for developers to get Magento 2 up and running quickly. Make sure to check out the slides when they come available. -- - Blackfire ??? And last but not least, there was a lot of talk on Blackfire. It is integrated in the Enterprise Cloud, however nothing is stopping you from implementing it in your own production or development environment. A very cool tool! Besides these topics, there was a lot more: There was a lot of talk on headless Magento shops, where a non-Magento frontend (for instance based on Angular) was connected to a Magento REST API. Also, progressive web apps were discussed, complete with service workers, polymers and custom elements. Things like the Internet of Things, wearables, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence popped up. APIs from an Amazon Echo to connect to a Magento REST API, to allow consumers to voice operate a Magento store. Pff, too much to mention. --- class: center, middle, orange # Next Imagine ## April 23-25, 2018 ??? In short, Magento Imagine was awesome. I loved it. And I'm definitely going to be there next year! --- class: center, middle # @yireo ??? If you have any comments, do let me know. And I hope to see you next year at Imagine. See you!