Exciting times for Magento developers. In November 2015 we witnessed the launch of the new version of the opensource e-commerce platform that now supports over 240.000 e-commerce websites. It had a completely reworked architecture and the introduction of the dependency management en drastic optimization of the mobile version gave the Magento community a lot to talk about.
At Baldwin, we were incredibly enthusiastic about the new opportunities and challenges that Magento 2.0 offers. On the 12th and 13th of May, we went to the sunny and very cozy Utrecht in the Netherlands for the 8th edition of the Magento Meet.
10u00: Migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2
Of course, the event focussed on Magento 2. The presentation by Matthias Zeis was all about tips on how to migrate your webshop from Magento 1 to Magento 2. There are extensions available to help you migrate your code and your databases.
They recommended upgrading your Magento 1 shop to the latest version before starting the migration process. We learned that there is quite a lot of manual work involved as well in order to configure the details.
Another important remark is to take the opportunity to evaluate your webshop and all it’s features to make sure if everything is truly necessary. It is time to remove any clutter and start with a fresh-looking upgrade of your new Magento 2 webshop.
10u30: Messing up dependency injection
Dependency injection is one of the new technical features in Magento 2. Jesse Reitsma dug deeper into the use of this new feature and also talked about code-smells in the Magento 2 code where this feature is often used in the wrong way. We learned about ways to build our own code extensions and how we can clean up the code in Magento 2. To be clear, this wasn’t a talk about functional bugs, but about how to code properly in Magento 2.
11u00: Deployments with Magento 2
After this, we listened to Bart Delvaux who talked about the necessary steps to take when you deploy a Magento 2 shop to a server. There are quite a few steps to take and the process can take a while. For example; you have to think about – the installation of composer dependencies, static files generation, database migration, PHP classes generation and compiling,… These topics can take up quite some time and it will force us to revise the workflow we developed for Magento 1. Deploys in Magento 2 can take up several minutes when you use multiple languages.
11u30: Security in Magento Shops
Time to listen to Andreas von Studnitz for a session about security in Magento 1. In recent years the theft of credit-card details, passwords and administrator and client details become more frequent. These have become an important target for hackers. It was good to hear that we were on track with the latest tips and tricks for webshop security.
14u00: Magento performance – Know your database
Ivan Chepurnyi, one of the five first Magento core developers was leading this session. This hour was all about the optimization of SQL queries for MySQL databases with large datasets (>100.000 records). Really interesting to see the splitting of queries instead of creating one big query to improve the performance of large datasets.
15u00: Composer, the right way
A composer is a tool that assists you with the installation of code in a way that the code can handle different sources. Composer is more and more used for the development of new CMS systems or frameworks but is now also suited for Magento. Rafael Dohms showed us a few common mistakes and learned us all about working with the composer in the best way possible.
15u30: Magento 2 content under version control
It doesn’t happen every day that Magento developers get inspired by WordPress, but student and module developer Gordon Lesti has a strong opinion on version control of the CMS content within Magento is a must and developed a module for it. The idea is pretty simple and it can be a handy solution to restore wrongly added content to a previous version. The module is available on GitHub.
16u00: The 12 habits of highly secured Magento merchants
The security of e-commerce businesses can be a demanding task. Jerry Eadeh of the hosting provider Nexcess guided us through the official PCI security standards, a series of standards created by a global forum that focusses on the development and implementation of security standards and the protection of data. We also received a great overview of point of attention on password security, SSL certificates and a few available tools for Magento shop security.
16u30: Hackers traced: a case study
In the presentation “Hackers traced: a case study” speaker Tim Muller described how hackers work and how they set up a hacker trap what they called a “honeypot”. That’s a Magento shop with a specific setup to lure in hackers and which can be used to analyze a hack attack without risking to expose sensitive user data. In this way, it is easier for them to spot a breach in security and anticipate it with new security updates. E-commerce security is a case of proactive behavior and constant monitoring.
The session presentations can be found here.
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