Magento 2 – A Developers Paradise, or Nightmare?

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Are we 18 months away from a Magento Developers Paradise of plain sailing and glitch-free updates, or are we going to see an episode of the Community Edition 1.3 upgrade, leaving themes, modules, developers and clients alike at square one?

That’s right, Magento have heard the community and made the announcement of rewriting Magento 2 for the upcoming 2012 release. We can only speculate and anticipate as there’s still a good 18 months left of their deadline, but nonetheless codename M2 is certainly a hot topic in the development community. Exciting stuff!

With a timetable of production release by mid to end of 2012, Magento 2 development is underway.

Here’s a chance to discuss and share your thoughts below while highlighting a few dev features we’d like to see considered in the ‘ground up’ architecture of Magento 2, that we think would sharpen the already most sophisticated, feature rich e-commerce platform available today.

For those lucky enough to go along, Day 2 of the upcoming Magento Developers Ibiza conference is the place to be to get an early heads up of the official feature list from the architect himself, Dmitriy Soroka (Magento Inc.).

Magento Developers Paradise is the only place where you can get a sneak preview of improvements and goals we have set for M2 from the lead architect himself!

Our Magento 2 Features Wishlist

  • Updates – A developers dream, a piece of software you can update without fear of spontaneous combustion. WordPress have managed it, hopefully the new Magneto 2 Connect Manager which some caught a glimpse of in the 1.5-RC2 release will greatly improve the procedure of both minor and updates to the core-platform.
  • jQuery – A long requested change which will make it’s way to Magento eventually, Magento 2 is the best chance they’ll get to oust Prototype in favor of the jQuery library.
  • HTML 5 – It’s taken the web by storm, hell, even Microsoft have tried to use it in IE9, would be great to see Magento use the new HTML 5 markup properly and consistently.
  • Caching / Optimisation – Will we see a leaner Magento, or further improved caching, perhaps pinched from the sought-after Enterprise Edition?
  • Javascript Dependency – In a perfect world, we’d all use the same ‘up to date’ browser with Cookies and Javascript enabled, but we don’t, and we can’t forget about those who still use legacy or just plain depreciated browsers, I won’t mention IE6, but we don’t think it would hurt to remove Javascript dependency for the fundamental e-commerce functions, Add to Cart and Checkout in particular.

In all the excitement we might have missed something off our features shortlist, leave us a comment with your Magento 2 requests and suggestions.