2010 is quickly rounding off and it’s been a great year for Magento, there’s no doubt about it. Early in the year, Magento secured $22.5 million in investment. Throughout the year, streams of companies have been joining the platform, whether it be to the community, professional or enterprise edition. As the turnouts to conferences such as Meet Magento and the Developer’s Paradise suggest, the industry realise it’s power within the marketplace.
I think 2011 is going to be even bigger and better. Just take look at all the things that we’ve got to be excited about:
The Imagine Conference
The inaugural eCommerce conference by Magento. With business and development tracks, it’s destined for success. Although I am unfortunately unable to attend this time around, nothing’s going to stop me next time. If you haven’t signed up yet, check it out, there’s still some early bird places http://www.magentocommerce.com/imagine.
Project Stratus
From the little that has been released about it, I think we can already see that this is going to be a big thing for the eCommerce industry. Software as a Service has become very popular in the last year, with the rise of the ‘cloud’. Project Stratus will result in the on-demand Magento eCommerce platform. It sounds like it’s going to be very flexible and customisable without having to get stuck into the code. It will also be PCI-compliant, something that is important in order for stores to handle credit card details.
Pssst, Magento people, invite key pretty please? ;)
Magento Connect Manager 2
This has been seen in the recent betas and release candidates for 1.4.2 but didn’t make it to the final version. However, I think we’re likely to see this included with the upcoming version CE 1.5. The upgrade to Magento Connect Manager allows modules to specify dependencies and also for alerts to be given when a module may be incompatible with a previously installed extension.
Magento Connect 2
Not to be confused with Magento Connect Manager, there is also a new version of Magento Connect on its way. Jonathan Beri released some of the details of the update at the Developer’s Paradise conference in October. Features that are expected are better licensing capabilities with rights management, optional encryption and also the ability to purchase commercial modules direct from Magento Connect rather than having to be redirected to a 3rd party site.
Magento Certification
We’ve heard rumours since the release of Magento of developer certification. This is going to be especially useful, as there has been some disgruntled community members with the coding standards in some Magento modules. In a recent webinar on building a winning mobile commerce strategy with Magento it was said that Magento certification is likely to be released early next year. Count me in!
Magento 2.0
While I haven’t seen any hints on whether this will see a 2011 release, we can certainly cross our fingers! Written from scratch, the way all version 2.0s should be, the new version of Magento is going to be integral to its continued success. It should be looking to improve on Magento’s biggest perceived weaknesses such as speed and bloat. One area that is expected to change is in the use of EAV database structure. Magento have already begun the move to flat tables with sales data in version 1.4.1.0, is this signs of an entire architecture restructuring? I think so. While great for flexibility and extensibility which is what Magento is all about, it’s the Foundation that great eCommerce stores can be built, EAV does have the problem of scalability and performance problems.
DIY Mage
And, I wouldn’t be able to let it go by without a shameless plug for Meanbee’s exciting new Magento Theme Framework, DIY Mage. Sign up to be the first to find out when we release more information. First newsletter should be within the next couple of weeks and we’re looking to release a beta in February.
Magento is going from strength to strength and is quickly becoming an eCommerce super power with hosted, cloud and app solutions. I’m so excited to be involved in such an awesome community and look forward to being even more so in the next year.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of the Magento Team and Community. Roll on 2011!