Magento Imagine 2019 – Review

by | May 22, 2019 | 0 comments

On May 13th to 15th, the annual Magento Imagine took place in Las Vegas. It is the biggest Magento conference worldwide, organized by Magento themselves.
integer_net was represented by Sonja and Andreas. As every year, there were several announcements. Here are the most important ones from our point of view:

Integration of Adobe Sensei for product recommendations

Sensei is the machine learning tool of Adobe. It will be used to deliver product recommendations (i.e. for cross selling, up selling or after a successful order) which depend on the user and their behavior regarding clicks and purchases.

An early access program is planned for Q3/2019, while the release will probably be in Q1/2020. The Adobe Sensei integration will be restricted to Magento 2 Commerce and will be included in the license costs.

Amazon and Google Shopping Integration

The co-operation between Magento (Adobe) and Amazon will be extended. In addition to the ability to sell products on Amazon from the Magento backend, Magento merchants will be able to get their own sub-store at Amazon, including individual categorization and, of course, individual products. While this program has already started on amazon.com, it will come to Europe in the next months.

An integration to Google Shopping was announced, too. You can find more information about both in an article on TechCrunch.

More Adobe Integrations

After Adobe acquired Magento in 2018, further Adobe services are about to be integrated with Magento. One of them is Adobe Stock, a huge image database, whose images can be used in CMS pages without leaving the Magento Admin. The foundation was laid at the Contribution Days which took place directly before Magento Imagine. The integration will be part of the Community Engineering Program and can be found on GitHub.

On top, Adobe Tag Manager will be available in Magento shortly. Indirectly, this will implement Adobe Analytics.

Magento Cloud on Microsoft Azure

While the Magento cloud offering only runs on Amazon AWS so far, it will be available on Microsoft Azure in the future, too. Horizontal autoscaling (it only scales manually at the moment) is another feature that is on the roadmap.

Further development of PWA Studio

Magento’s PWA solution PWA Studio is continuously enhanced. In our opinion, it can’t be used in projects yet without a lot of additional development, but it takes big steps forward.

PageBuilder for Magento 2 Open Source

PageBuilder is the new CMS solution of Magento which was recently released as part of Magento Commerce.

The communication about whether PageBuilder will also be available for Magento 2 OpenSource was unclear in the previous months. During a Q&A session after one of the breakout sessions at Imagine, Olena Tkacheva, the responsible product manager at Magento, announced that PageBuilder will come to Magento 2 OpenSource in the future. More details about the timing were not given.

Adjustments to the support end dates of different Magento versions

Minor releases (i.e. 2.3) will now be supported by Magento for 12 months after the next release (i.e. 2.4). Security updates will be delivered for additional 6 months.
The support of Magento 2.2 will end in December 2019, coinciding with the support of PHP 7.1.

On a more personal note

Each year, Magento awards 20 persons from the Magento community as “Magento Masters“, honoring their contributions and the impact they had on the Magento ecosystem. Those contributions can be pull requests, translations, blog posts, talks, the organization of events and support on StackExchange or the Magento Forums. The Magento Masters are presented and awarded on stage at Magento Imagine. Two of the integer_net team members are among these in 2019: Sonja and Andreas.


You can read more about the Masters program and our role in that in a separate blog post: For the third time in a row: two Magento Masters at integer_net.

Magento Imagine 2020 alongside the Adobe Summit

Just one month before Magento Imagine, the much bigger Adobe Summit took place, also in Las Vegas. It was clear that these events compete with each other in a way, so the events should either be more different and distant from each other, or they should be combined to one. During the last keynote, it was announced that Magento Imagine will take place alongside of Adobe Summit in Las Vegas in 2020. More details are yet to be defined.

About the Event

As always, Magento Imagine was perfectly organized. 3,500 attendees were present, but it never felt crowded.
We noticed that there have been way fewer participants from Europe. Our guess: this is at least partly due to the successful MagentoLive conference, which is at least as relevant for many European agencies and merchants as the US-centric Imagine. At the same time, travel costs are much lower for a trip to MagentoLive.

Summary

Again, Magento Imagine was a very impressive and interesting event. A visit always pays off as you get to talk to many interesting people and receive a lot of information first hand – from Magento / Adobe employees, but also from other agencies and merchants. The community continues to prosper. We experienced a good general mood, and also the takeover of Magento by Adobe seems to be perceived quite positively. Adobe is busy making clear that Magento continues to provide solutions for SMB (small and medium-sized businesses) and the mid market, and that Magento won’t transform into an enterprise-only tool. An important part here is the support of the free OpenSource edition.

Andreas von Studnitz

Author: Andreas von Studnitz

Andreas von Studnitz is a Magento developer and one of the Managing Directors at integer_net. His main areas of interest are backend development, Magento consulting and giving developer trainings. He is a Magento 2 Certified Professional Developer Plus and holds several other Magento certifications for both Magento 1 and Magento 2. Andreas was selected as a Magento Master in 2019 and 2020.

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