Building the Future of Magento Open Source

One day after Willem Wigman and Vinai Kopp from Hyvä Themes together with other Magento community members published an open letter to the Magento community to announce a new initiative that will focus on safeguarding the future of Magento Open Source, Adobe Commerce Senior Director Product, John Stockton, wrote the following on the Magento DevBlog:

The power of open source software is how it enables a global community of developers to build upon and extend the core code to address a wide range of business needs and use cases. The Magento community has always been a key source of innovation, not just for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source, but throughout the ecommerce industry – pioneering solutions, rapidly advancing product capabilities, and enabling companies from diverse industries to achieve their customer experience visions. Over the 14 years since Magento was first released, the platform’s flexibility has enabled the largest ecosystem in all of commerce to execute on every imaginable digital business case and empowered customers, partners, and developers to succeed.

As the landscape changes, the Magento community is ensuring it remains a leading platform for solving commerce needs, particularly for SOHO (Small Office, Home Office – 1 to 10 workers) and SMB (Small and Medium sized Businesses) customers, and Adobe is dedicated to helping the community continue to drive product value. Adobe is confident in the future of Magento Open Source and invested in being a good partner to cultivate that future through the Magento Association.

Adobe will continue to partner with the community to ensuring that the core open source codebase is secure and high quality, while we focus on delivering incremental capabilities released as independent modules to help our customers realize new value. This approach takes into account customer feedback on simplifying the upgrade process and lowering total cost of ownership, while also allowing us to bring new capabilities to market faster. Features like PWA Studio, GraphQL expansion, Sales Channels, and more are examples of how the entire Community will continue to benefit from the independently released functionality. We are also excited to see the innovation that customers, partners, and developers across our community will bring to Page Builder. Joint development projects bring together Adobe’s product, UX, and QA teams to work closely with community members on key initiatives like the Platform Health and PHP 8 compatibility projects.

Through events like Adobe Developers Live, coming on October 4 & 5, Magento Association Connect, Community Engineering led Community Hangouts, and GitHub driven conversations, we are excited to continue engaging in two-way dialogue with our developer and partner community about the future of open source, and Adobe’s ongoing support of the community.

Another Magento DevBlog posted on August 8, 2021 by Adobe team member Sidolovado explains the new delivery process for community contributions in order to address the frustration of many Magento community contributors over the years, having to wait for too long to see their fixes and improvements included into Magento core or pull requests (code changes on Github) not to be included at all.

New Delivery Process for Community Contributions

Community contributions play an important role in ensuring a platform remains modern, secure, and stable. In the most recent Magento release, the community contributed fixes to resolve over 300 GitHub issues. Currently, when contributions by the community are accepted, they are included in the next patch release. In addition, fixes are only accepted to the latest release line. Merchants and systems integrators needing to apply critical fixes have to wait for the next release or build and manage patches themselves.  

To address this challenge, the new delivery process will allow the community to access contributions as they are approved, without having to wait for a core code release. With this new process, contributions will be delivered using the quality patches tool for Adobe Commerce & Magento Open Source, allowing all customers to have quick access to these fixes.

This process will initially be available for the 2.3.7 release and will eventually be expanded for other released versions as well. 

Process Overview

This delivery process will be driven by community maintainers. When an issue is reported, a community developer can create a Pull Request (PR) for the fix. This request is automatically tested and then verified by maintainers. Once reviewed, the PR is merged and published as a quality patch. The fix will be publicly accessible via the quality patches tool within a day after being merged. 

Also, all P0/P1 issues, along with some high-impact P2s, will be delivered as part of the next release. The contributing author will be kept and highlighted on release notes, as is done currently.

Benefits and Goals

In the previous process, only contributions to the latest release were accepted, e.g. the 2.3 release line was closed for community contributions. This new delivery process will allow the community to contribute to already released versions, starting with 2.3.7. In the future, contributions to any version could potentially be accepted.

By automating the delivery process and empowering the community maintainers to accept these contributions, the time to market of a contribution will be significantly decreased. Once they are accepted and merged, an automated process will pack it and release it into the quality patches tool, allowing merchants to apply the fix to their instance immediately.

While all P1 and P0 fixes will be included in the next release, merchants have flexibility in choosing lower priority patches that are relevant to their application. The core product codebase remains lightweight resulting in lower costs to maintain and upgrade.

Quality Patches Tool for Adobe Commerce & Magento Open Source

The quality patches tool is designed to deliver patches created by Adobe for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source customers, with the package easily installed via composer. The tool identifies the version of Adobe Commerce / Magento Open Source your installation is running and lists the patches available for it. Patches can then be applied and reverted using the tool. 

The quality patches tool will now be made available to distribute patches created by the community and approved by community maintainers, allowing merchants quick access to important fixes for their instances. 

Frequently Asked Questions