Magento Live Europe is one of the few events of this kind officially organized by Magento. This year’s edition was held in Barcelona on October 8th – 10th. The conference gathered together guests from all over the world, from Baldwin Belgium & Romania included. We want to make sure we share this experience with other Magento enthusiasts, like you.🙌
Why did you want to attend Magento Live Europe 2018 and what did you expect from the event?
- Jeroen, Project Manager: I expected a big show since it’s the biggest Magento event for Europe and they will use it for the announcement of Magento 2.3, and its major features. Moreover, I was really excited about future insights into the joint-venture Adobe/Magento.
- Tristan, Full Stack Developer: The main goal for me going to an event like this was in the first place, networking.
- Vlad, Front End Developer: From the start, I was expecting fresh information about the future of Magento and I planned to connect with some of the people in the community (I try to do this as often as I can).
- Adam, Front End Developer: What I wanted from Magento Live Europe 2018 was a Magento 2.3 preview and to attend some inspirational talks.
What sessions did you attend? Which one impressed you the most and why?
The most impressive sessions were the ones regarding Magento 2.3. They have plenty of new things to bring to the table with this version: bugfixes (they said that more than 1700 bugs were fixed for this version), MSI will come as a free solution, of course, PWA, GraphQL and many more. The PWA will come in Magento 2.3 but it will be ongoing for some time since they still have to refactor and create new modules.
Fundamental Properties of the GraphQL Language
This presentation was pretty awesome. After 10 minutes of business talk about it, they went into the technical part and provided some good insights with code examples and such. Awesome!👌
Experience-Driven Commerce
This was something promising, an ideal thing that they will try to do, something that Adobe got to Magento. This is how Adobe is developing their solutions and it works awesome for them, so High Hopes for Magento.
Also, Bruce Dickinson was awesome, he managed to do a parallel talk about music and e-commerce and explain that most of the shop owners do not have a good idea about how to build a relationship with the customers and that’s why they are no successful.
We spoke to the builder of Bluefoot about their acquisition by Magento. How the integration with the page builder will be, some problems we had with the current page-builder module and how they will tackle problems like copying information to other store views. Furthermore, we talked with the people of Vaimo, who did an excellent job at auditing Magento projects.
Jisse Reitsma, from Yireo, was also one of the guys we went to. We talked about deployment techniques, containerization, and the buzz-word ‘PWA’. Tom Karwatka, CEO of Divante, joined our conversation. His company created a vue.js frontend store for the Magento platform. It looks really interesting.
Do you have any news regarding Magento 2.3? Which will be the key improvements brought by this version?
YES. New features, lots of bugfixes and they plan to integrate so many things in the future. Now they already have integration for Amazon.com for shopping and Google Ads for advertising, next thing will be Google shopping for the Marketplace integration and Amazon Advertising and in the future, they will make solutions for Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, eBay, Wallmart for the marketplace (Facebook and Instagram look promising for our Fashion shops) and for advertising they will integrate Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and Bing.
From the developer’s point of view, it will open new challenges in the future and opportunities to learn/evolve.
As a timeline at the end of November will be released 2.3 Beta that will include PWA studio beta also. at the end of the year they expect to deliver a Stable version for 2.3 with Beta Page Builder and in the Q1 of next year 2.3.1 with stable things regarding PWA and Other features ( Magento Payment, Google Ads, Etc. )
Topics at the conference that interested me were the new way of creating/altering database tables in Magento 2.3. Until now we used setup scripts to maintain the database but this will change to something called ‘Declarative Schemas’. These new schema files will improve the maintainability and make it easy to roll back the database and perform dry-run and validation against the schema files.
GraphQL will also come in Magento2.3. This is a query language for APIs. It will improve the transfer of data and has numerous advantages over REST and SOAP API calls since you can define what data you’d like to fetch.
Multi-Stock Inventory, as the word describes, we allow the shop-owner to manage several inventories or stock locations in Magento, which wasn’t possible until now. This project came from the Magento community and shows how great and awesome we as Magento developers are!
A few months ago, Adobe completed the acquisition of Magento Commerce. How will this impact the future of Magento?
Experience-driven Commerce is the term Adobe used to make every experience shop-able with the integration of Magento Commerce Cloud into Adobe Experience Cloud.
Providing analytics, content management, and personalization will make it possible for enterprise companies to create a personalized shopping experience.
More information about the acquisition can be found here: https://news.adobe.com/press-release/experience-cloud/adobe-accelerates-experience-driven-commerce-major-advancements
If you would create a summary of the event for a Magento enthusiast, which would be the most important takeaways from this conference?
It was a great experience. We had the pleasure to meet and talk with some passionate people from Google, Bronto, Sendinblue, Mirasvit, Deloitte, Hypernode, Nosto, Straker, Atwix, Klevu, Riff, FitForme, etc.
We got some good insights about the developers, Magento workflow & community-driven features. The venue was nice, the food was delicious and if we could do it again we would most likely get in touch with many more people.
