Marius Strajeru, Jisse Reitsma, Rakesh Jesadiya talk about Magento 2

Today I have something special for you.

3 well known Magento experts :

Marius Strajeru: Magento Master 2017, #1 contributor of all time to the popular Q&A site Magento.StackExchange.

Jisse Reitsma: Magento Master 2017, Founder, Developer and Trainer, Yireo.

Rakesh Jesadiya: Top contributor in India to Magento Community 2017, #11 contributor of all time to the Magento.StackExchange.

I asked them 12 questions about M2:

3 Magento experts answer 12 questions:

1. For an average store owner - would you recommend investing in Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration? Please give three reasons why?
2. What resources (blogs, books, websites) would you recommend to someone who's new to Magento 2?
3. What Magento 2 theme would you recommend?
4. Is Magento 2 significantly faster than Magento 1?
5. How would you deal with slow Magento 2 site? Name three optimization tweaks you would do.
6. What hosting company do you think is suited to run Magento 2 site?
7. VPS, cloud, shared - what do you think is the best hosting plan for Magento 2?
8. Do you think Magento 2 is a new era of commerce innovation? Please name three innovations.
9. Would you recommend new developers to learn Magento 2? Does it worth financially?
10. Will Magento 1 be abandoned after 2018? Your future scenario for Magento 1?
11. What would you recommend to Magento 1 store owners who can't afford Magento 2 migration?
12. What Magento 2 skills were the hardest for you to learn and why?

...and here is what they had to say:

1. For an average store owner - would you recommend investing in Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration? Please give three reasons why?

Marius Strajeru:

I still have mixed feelings about this. If I have to come up with 3 reasons to why to upgrade here they are:

- long time support and upgrades for M2, which will probably not happen for M1, not at the M2 level at least. I doubt that M1 will introduce new big features.

- Open for the future: potential to integrate newer technologies that might appear in the future (see what's happening now for PWA for example)

- M2 overcomes some issues that M1 had.

But just for the sake of it here are some reasons against upgrading to m2:

- Cost: If your M1 platform works and brings in the money and does not need constant attention I don't see a reason to move to m2. (this applies mostly to small businesses)

- Inconsistency: M2 is not yet as consistent as M1. It's getting there, but not yet.

- Low number of community modules. Again, this will be solved in time, the ball is already rolling but it's not yet at m1's level.

Jisse Reitsma:

We're now about 1 year away from the actual deadline (End of Life of Magento 1) and a store owner should have a migration plan by now.

It doesn't mean that you need to invest right away, it means that you should have spent already the right amount of time to find out what your investment is going to look. If you don't have such a plan yet, you are not paying respect to your own wallet.

So, to give 3 reasons why you should get ready for a migration anyway:

First of all, Magento 2 is progressing rapidly with numerous features popping up, making it better than Magento 1. While Magento 1 is not progressing at all anymore, it is slowly dying.

Second, if you are investing in your shop in any ways, you prove to yourself that there is money to be spent. That money should be either spent on migration right away, or it should be saved so you can spend it later. Do not spend it on extending Magento 1, because it simply gets you deeper into Magento 1 and makes it more difficult to migrate.

Last but not least, Magento 2 might be a big investment now, it will safe you time thus money later: There are less extension conflicts, easier upgrades, more choice, better performance - a lot of things that might prove different on the short term, but are true on the long run. By not crossing over, you miss out.

Rakesh Jesadiya:

Yes, Magento 2 is the next generation eCommerce platform.

Reason 1. Magento 1 support is available till 2020. Magento 1.x will not be extended for any new features. Most of the new functionality is available in magento 2 codebase whereas M1 doesn't have any additional changes added now. Magento team gives more focus to M2.

If you have a store with performance issues and need to update it, You need to definitely switch to Magento 2.

M2 has the latest technology stack available and give full page cache with community platform by default.

Now with Magento 2.2, we can say that, it’s more stable than its previous version of M2.0.* and 2.1.*, M2.2 gives B2B(Enterprise) and Social connect functionality like facebook shop using magento 2 admin with 9 products keep in facebook shop and for more products you have to upgrade your plan.

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2. What resources (blogs, books, websites) would you recommend to someone who's new to Magento 2?

Marius Strajeru:

I usually get my info from the official documentation: https://devdocs.magento.com . This is way better than what M1 had and stackoverflow (magento.stackexchange.com included).

Jisse Reitsma:

There are numerous resources to learn from. Blogs, books, sites are just a few of them. You can also learn from others (local usergroups, conferences) or an experienced Magento guru (conferences, trainings).

In any case, I think you should start by having a Magento 2 testing site available that you can modify at will, without messing with your actual life site. And from this testing site, you will bump into issues that you need to resolve

Rakesh Jesadiya:

I would recommended Magento devdocs documentation for the newcomers to Magento2 : https://devdocs.magento.com . It gives well composed resources with which a beginner can learn magento 2. It's also kept updated relating to the current version. It’s a good entry point for the new people to magento 2.

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3. What Magento 2 theme would you recommend?

Marius Strajeru:

There is no silver bullet for this on from my point of view. Different themes look nice or not for different people. I would recommend though a code audit before installing anything. The closer the theme is to the core theme, the more future proof it is.

Jisse Reitsma:

I would recommend building upon the Magento_blank theme. Some people recommend the Snowdog_blank theme as well, but if you don't have a strong need to use Gulp and SASS, I think the Magento original is a safe bet. From this theme, you can customize what you need.

Rakesh Jesadiya:

I haven't worked with any theme yet. We made custom theme based on requirements of projects with frontend developer. It's best to create your own custom theme, based on project psd. It gives more boost to performance of the site.

Many themes are available on the market but they all have so many functionality which is not related to our site and it takes time to modify current theme and it might create a performance problem too.

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4. Is Magento 2 significantly faster than Magento 1?

Marius Strajeru:

Sorry, but I don't have the numbers. One thing is for sure, if M2 is not yet faster than M1, someone is working on this.

Jisse Reitsma:

Yes. But you need to tune everything first: Production Mode, PHP 7, Zend OPCache, MySQL tuning, Nginx, PHP-FPM, SSD drives. My personal experience is that Magento 2 is a lot faster than Magento 1. And whoever disagrees is perhaps comparing apples with pears.

Rakesh Jesadiya:

Yes, I think so, It's faster and I have realized it in our projects.

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5. How would you deal with slow Magento 2 site? Name three optimization tweaks you would do.

Marius Strajeru:

- full page cache (varnish that now has native support).
- throw hardware at it.
- hire a good sys-admin/devops that deals with these things every day.

Jisse Reitsma:

Enable Zend OPCache, even in development, and tune it. Tune MySQL InnoDB buffers. And make sure to work with all caches enabled, even in development (except for FPC).

Rakesh Jesadiya:

-- Use defer js extension.
-- Image optimization, CSS/JS Merge/minify.
-- Keep Better code (try to avoid get rid of foreach loop and objects)
-- Disable unnecessary core extension.
-- For static files we use cdn server to give more boost to the site.

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6. What hosting company do you think is suited to run Magento 2 site?

Marius Strajeru:

Sorry, but I don't want to name names. I'm not paid to advertise :)

Jisse Reitsma:

I don't have any opinion on this.

Rakesh Jesadiya:

I have mostly deal with AWS Server for our project.

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7. VPS, cloud, shared - what do you think is the best hosting plan for Magento 2?

Marius Strajeru:

I think magento 2 does not even work on a shared host. So that is out of the question.
For small businesses I would recommend cloud. You don't want the extra headache of managing your infrastructure.
Big businesses might want more control so maybe VPS is the way to go, but this does not mean they should not thing of cloud.

Jisse Reitsma:

I don't have any opinion on this.

Rakesh Jesadiya:

I cannot give the specific answer for this question, our devops engineer might provide more information on the site server requirements.

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8. Do you think Magento 2 is a new era of commerce innovation? Please name three innovations.

Marius Strajeru:

Again, this is very subjective. I'm not very familiar with other platforms. But I do believe that they invest a lot of money and time for aligning with the latest market requirements and leave the window open for the future requirements.

Jisse Reitsma:

Magento 2 is simply the next new thing after Magento 1. And we can debate innovations, it is simply a fact that Magento 1 is going to be outdated and Magento 2 is the only Magento choice now.

The innovations are mostly on a technical level - composer, namespaces, PHP Dependency Injection, testability, JavaScript dependency management.

For a merchant, this new technology simply allows for new stuff to be created. I firmly believe Magento is not open source to make it freely available for merchants, it is open source so that developers extend upon it in a flexible way.

Rakesh Jesadiya:

Yes.

1. With Magento 2, you can customize your digital site based on your requirement, more flexible and scalable, open source and developer friendly codebase.

2. Powerful Active community engagement with magento.

3.Easy to maintain and upgrade from old to newer version.

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9. Would you recommend new developers to learn Magento 2? Does it worth financially?

Marius Strajeru:

I would recommend developers to learn anything. The more you know the better. This includes M2.

Jisse Reitsma:

Yes, definitely. The finances are simply how you deal with your own effort, the balance with what the client expects and the fair calculation of what the road and the end-result are worth for both.

But because Magento 2 is technically superior to Magento 1 (and any other open source e-commerce system out there, for that matter), there can't be solid reasons not to learn Magento 2 - except for it being a bit more complex.

The complexity simply shows that frontend and backend development are involving more technologies than a simple PHP app in a LAMP stack. Developers need to learn, need to evolve, and Magento 2 shows that path.

Rakesh Jesadiya:

Yes, I think magento 2 is more developer friendly to learn as compared to magento 1. Now new client expects to deal with magento 2.

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10. Will Magento 1 be abandoned after 2018? Your future scenario for Magento 1?

Marius Strajeru:

I'm willing to bet anyone that M1 will not be abandoned in 2018. I will bet that in 2025 there will still be M1 shops, all patched up against future security holes. Either by Magento itself or it will be a community driver effort. M1 usage is too big now to just make it go away in 1 year or less.

Jisse Reitsma:

Yes, Magento 1 will be abondoned after 2018 - at least by me. I need to choose between an agile Magento 2 ecosystem and an outdated Magento 1 ecosystem, and I choose Magento 2. Some people will definitely focus on Magento 1 after 2018.

For programmers, you can see this as the difference between the COBOL language (1959) and JavaScript (1995) - if you are still focussing on COBOL, it might for a reason but you'll know that you're working with an outdated language. To me, it is fine if people still work with Magento 1 in the year 2030. Just don't bother me with it.

Rakesh Jesadiya:

I heard that Magento will continue to support M1 up to 2020.Recently we more focus on Magento 2, All the new projects deal with magento 2. I work only a little bit with magento 1, on sites which are already built on Magento 1.

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11. What would you recommend to Magento 1 store owners who can't afford Magento 2 migration?

Marius Strajeru:

Don't migrate if you cannot afford it. I kind of listed above some reasons why not to upgrade.

Jisse Reitsma:

This is a difficult question. Magento 2 requires (so far) a bigger budget than Magento 1. And a lot of times when merchants don't have the finances for Magento 2, they have chosen for Magento 1 because of the hype, not because they actually needed it.

I would advice to spend time on consolidating the business plans, seeing what is needed and what is not, and then come up with a strategy that brings in the most money with the least amount of investment. WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Shopify, they might be used. But it follows from proper planning.

Rakesh Jesadiya:

If a client can't afford magento 2 migration, and they are happy with Magento 1 site performance and site functionality, they might wait and watch up to magento 1 expiration period, otherwise It’s perfect time to switch for magento 2.2 version now.

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12. What Magento 2 skills were the hardest for you to learn and why?

Marius Strajeru:

Definitely UI-components. I'm still struggling with it. I mean I got used to the concept, I can do simple tasks with them, but when you deviate a little more from the "usual" I have troubles.

Jisse Reitsma:

Magento 2 frontending was one of the toughest parts, not just for me but for most developers.

Currently, I'm actually giving a lot of developers training in how to use KnockoutJS and RequireJS properly in Magento 2 to build your own modules and themes, even leading up to the creation of your own uiComponents.

There is a lot to digest. But because I hang in there, I now feel confident in working with it. It takes time and effort to learn this, but if you make that effort and invest that time, it pays off. The methods that you use to learn, might differ: You might invest in a quickstart training, learn from online tutorials, listen to talks at conferences.

But in the end, the energy that you invest into learning Magento 2 leads to the end result of you having full control. And that's what Magento 2 is all about.

Rakesh Jesadiya:

Knockout js and UI Component were hardest for me to learn in Magento 2.

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