I’ll start this off by saying that I really appreciated all of the speakers who presented at the conference these past two days in Austin, Texas. The presentations were very helpful, fun and reassuring as we look forward to what’s next in the Magento-sphere. It’s an exciting time to be in eCommerce and after this past few days I can honestly say that I am stoked for Magento 2! I’m also impressed by just how friendly and honest everyone in this community is. I can’t wait to see everyone again at Imagine next year!
Alright – let’s dive into some of the takeaways I had from the event.
It’s Time for Magento 2
The main thing I’m taking away from the conference is that Magento 2 is ready! It’s not going to be easy to move older clients on M1 to M2, but we’ve always know that would be the case. That said, new merchants or merchants looking to migrate from platforms like Volusion, Shopify, etc. should go straight to M2. The integrations are there, the extensions are ready and the code base is a getting fairly stable. The team at Magento is committed to working though and dramatically reducing the number of know issues on github over the next few months. M2.2 is going to have a few big updates but on a whole we should see things settling down in the near future.
Documentation is Coming
All of the Magento team shared that this was a key focus for them and they are heavily encouraging the community to contribute. A lack of documentation has always plagued Magento. Merchants who are considering Magento as a solution often complain that it’s hard for them to assess or learn. So I’m very happy to report that this is another key issue that the Magento team is focusing on. With more community involvement I think we can all expect a lot of improvement here.
Differentiation for Enterprise
It’s never been easy to sell a client on using Magento Enterprise, after all much of the added functionality in M1 EE can be obtained using a couple extensions. That’s going to change in M2. Already offerings like RabbitMQ are helping EE to stand out. And there’s going to be a lot, lot more coming out for EE in the future. I’m excited to see more functionality from analytics to B2B features that will really help EE stand apart from CE.
The Count Down Begins
M2 is here, but for older merchants on M1 it’s time to start planning a move to M2. Most of the agencies I spoke with are setting a 2 year goal for moving their M1 clients to M2. 2 years might seem like ages, but it’s going to go by quickly! Just think about how long a website takes to develop in the first place. Moving that site to M2 isn’t going to take just as long, but it will take a good amount of time. It’s time to start planning on how, when and how much it’s going to cost to get your site migrated to M2.
