The OpenMage LTS (Long Term Support) repository aims to be a dependably patched archive of the Magento 1 CE (Community Edition) core releases maintained by Lee Saferite, David Robinson, Daniel Fahlke and the Magento community of agencies, freelancers and module vendors.
These sources should stay as compatible to the sources released by Magento as possible. Pull requests with unofficial bug fixes and security patches from the community are definitely encouraged. It’s the project’s goal to apply patches available from Magento as quickly as possible, but these do not always cover all known issues.
Though Magento does not follow semantic versioning, the project aims to provide a workable system for dependancy definition. A release version might look something like «1.9.1.0», but there may have been some functionality added since the «1.9.0.0» release. There might also have been some patches released with no update to the currently available sources or version number. Because of this a slightly different system to define each decimal place has to be defined.
Magento Fork?
This is only technically a fork. The project still aims to run in parallel with the official Magento sources. Any time there’s a new release version, a new branch will be created. Any time there’s a patch, it will be applied. The only difference is bug fixes from the community are accepted. This allows to work off of stable sources without having to wait for official patches from Magento. This also means that if you’re running an older version of Magento, you’ll still get all patches that apply to your version.
Magento Connect
A couple of days ago the project made another interesting announcement. One essential part of the Magento Ecosystem is the Marketplace and the big number of extensions for many use cases. But with the end of life of Magento 1 it’s to expect, also the marketplace will get cleaned of all the Magento 1 modules at one point. This already happened once a few years back, when a lot of older modules got removed from the marketplace.
To ensure they are preserved and available for the OpenMage project, a side project was started. The OpenMage Module Fostering is an archive of all the Open Source Magento 1 modules available via Magento Connect. But this will only be the first step. Having them all on Github, also allows to manage the continuation of working on them through the community on a central place. After skipping some modules with problems, 2834 modules were imported. This will also help to make them all compatible with PHP8 and solve security related issues of unmaintained modules.
More Info
If you have any questions about migrating your Magento 1 store to OpenMage LTS, feel free to leave a comment or get in touch.
