A few weeks ago, members of Team Pinpoint attended an exciting few days in Amsterdam for MagentoLive Europe. The second-largest Magento event of the year, MagentoLive attracts Magento partners from all over the world including specialist agencies and third-party technologies. The event presents a great opportunity to get involved with the community, test drive some of the new Adobe products and discuss plans for 2020 with Magento themselves.
Managing Director, Lewis, was accompanied by Head of Development, Douglas, Business Development Director, Gavin, and Front-End Developer, Chris, to the event. The team returned to the UK feeling inspired and excited for Pinpoint’s future with Magento. Take a read of our top takeaways…
The Magento Community
Interesting stats were shared regarding the ever-growing Magento community. The community now has:
- 415k Community Members
- 24k Meetup members
- 12k Certified individuals
- 11 Certification types
- 1,100+ global partners (solution, technology etc)
- 375+ events around the world
- 5,445 extensions on Magento Marketplace
- 65% new contributions in 2019 (Year to date)
Early adopters of Progressive Web Apps (PWA)
Heavy focus was placed on Progressive Web Apps throughout the event, with many presentations revolving around implementation of PWA projects. Eric Erway (Sr. Manager, Product Management at Adobe) and James Zetlen (Frontend Architect, Progressive Wep Apps at Adobe) kicked off the conference discussing their findings on business leaders who have run Magento’s PWA Studios to deliver enhanced shopping experiences.
There was also a hands-on lab run by James Zetlen and Andrew Wilcox, introducing developers to PWA Studio and showing them how to create their own PWA on GraphQL. The lab demonstrated how to customise the Magento starter theme, Venia, to match customer branding, adding elements to menus and using GraphQL to pull product information from the Magento database without using the frontend system.
Patch, upgrades and support
Magento announced they are introducing a number of changes to the way they release functional and security patches from version 2.3.3. They are looking to release ‘security-only’ versions of their updates allowing businesses to apply hotfixes and security updates without having to take on any new functionality.
With version 2.4 on the horizon, Magento have shared that 2.2 will no longer receive updates from December 2020. Once 2.4 has been released, the date of which 2.3 will no longer receive updates will be announced, and so on…
Extensions and add-ons
Extensions and add-ons are getting a re-vamp with a ‘Certified Extension’ scheme being introduced by Magento. Certain extensions will be certified through a process which not only checks their functionality but also their interactivity with other certified extensions. Magento’s is implementing this as certain extensions do not currently work well together. In future, you’ll be able to install multiple Certified Extensions without this worry.
Magento product recommendations powered by Adobe Sensei
Misha Kotov, Senior Product Manager at Adobe, guided us on the introduction of Adobe Sensei. Sensei is an AI-powered marketing tool used to increase conversion rates and stimulate customer engagement. Kotov explained the offering, following up with a technical deep dive into the AI product and how it makes decisions for product recommendations.
Technology partners
There were a whole host of tech partners at the event and we had the chance to catch up with some of them including dotdigital, Klarna, Klevu, Yotpo and Adyen, gathering the latest news and sharing ideas.
Partners continue to innovate, integrating deeper into the platform even as Magento continue to innovate and acquire new businesses in similar functional areas themselves. For example, Yotpo, a Premier Magento Partner is an eCommerce marketing platform, helping brands drive growth by creating engaging customer experiences. This solution can easily be integrated with your Magento 2 website through a joint bundles integration which is great news for us (and you!) as it provides more choice and is a trusted, recommended integration.
Client insights
Keynotes were presented from clients including Nestle and Zadig&Voltaire with interesting insights into how bigger companies are using the platform on a global scale. Adobe and Magento dedicated their keynote presentations around how much of the Adobe software suite was available to Magento users and what might happen in the future with regards to integration between the platforms.
Our client, Beer Hawk, received a shout-out from Brian Green, Head of Commercial Sales & GTM, in his opening presentation. We were also told a big announcement was imminent and would probably be made two or three weeks after the event. We’re ready and waiting!
Overall, Amsterdam RAI was a great venue with evening events run by Magento and other sponsors that provided brilliant networking opportunities. There was a variety of different tracks run throughout the event with well-attended, relevant sessions covering multiple topics. Except maybe the early morning session after the Magento party, that unsurprisingly had a few less attendees…
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