Pod1 Blog

A couple of us are at the Magento Developers Paradise meeting in Palma, Mallorca (a tough job but someone has to do it) and this is hopefully the first of several posts about proceedings.

The event’s being held in a hotel near Palma, and it kicked off with a keynote speech from Varien’s CTO, Yoav Kutner, which outlined a host of plans for the new versions of Magento, which will start with 2.0. The new release will be a substantial re-engineering, and is likely to be out in the new year.

Highlights for me included an incredibly useful and interesting talk about the things that every Magento developer should know. I’ve been of the view for a long time that php is so accessible to developers, and so powerful and easy to use, that it makes (for some) the focus on architecture, engineering and computer science optional. That’s led to some very poorly crafted php applications. Magento clearly isn’t one of those: it’s very well thought through and built. Often, though, people enhance Magento in a bad way, and this talk was about how to avoid that. The gist was that developers need to think about architecture and design for a proper amount of time, and only code when they’ve done that.

There was another great talk about Magento extensions, why they’re great, and how to build them. Pod1 focusses strongly on building enhancements as reusable extensions, and I think Ashley Schroder who gave this talk reinforced a lot of our thinking.

Magento Connect, which is the tool that distributes extensions to Magento is going through a great deal of change over the next few months: integrated payments, better search and user interface, but there remains an issue with extension quality that needs addressing. We are often referred to extensions that purport to implement specific functionality for a client’s website, we download them, install them and too often find they don’t live up to their promise. If only we could get reliable reviews and feedback on all Magento extensions.

The good news is that this is an eCommerce problem that’s already been solved: the retailer who emails you to rate your purchase, the Android phone that asks you why you’ve removed the application, Trip Adviser and the excellent work of people like Bazaarvoice and Feefo are all examples. To me, all Magento need to do is collect an email address at download time, email and ask for the download to be reviewed 1 month after download, and track usage in Magento itself. They could then track feedback, installs and un-installs very easily, building a grid by extension version and Magento version.

Tonight there’s a networking opportunity (which is a euphemism for cocktails, apparently) and then more talks tomorrow and Tuesday.