hyva

Sanne Bolkenstein

The Future of Magento with Sanne Bolkenstein

In this episode of Talk Commerce, I had the pleasure of chatting with Sanne Bolkenstein, Commercial Director at Hyva. We dove deep into the world of Magento, exploring the challenges it faces, the innovative solutions Hyva offers, and the exciting potential of MageOS for the platform’s future. Sanne’s insights were incredibly valuable, and this blog post summarizes the key takeaways from our conversation, including my personal reflections on the Magento landscape.

Magento’s Performance Woes and Hyva’s Solution

One of the major issues Sanne and I discussed is the performance of many Magento sites. I believe that a significant percentage of Magento stores are quite slow, and this is a big problem for merchants. Sanne highlighted how the default Luma front-end, which is over a decade old, can lead to frustrating development times and impact performance. This frustration, shared by many Magento developers, was what led Willem Wigman to create Hyva.

Hyva, with its Hoover front-end, aims to address these challenges head-on. As Sanne explained, Hoover offers a lightweight and efficient solution compared to Luma, with fewer dependencies and significantly improved performance. This leads to faster loading times, a better user experience, and reduced development costs for merchants. I’ve heard similar feedback from others in the community, which solidifies my belief that Hyva can be a game-changer for many Magento sites.

Hyva vs. PWA Studio & Luma: A Clear Choice?

Naturally, we discussed Hyva in relation to other solutions like PWA Studio and sticking with Luma. Sanne’s perspective was clear: PWA Studio is in maintenance mode, and choosing it wouldn’t be the best decision for most merchants. As for Luma, she couldn’t fathom why anyone would opt for it considering the performance and development drawbacks. I personally agree with Sanne that, for Magento users, especially those seeking improved performance, Hyva is a much more attractive and cost-effective solution.

The Magento Community: A European Perspective

During our conversation, Sanne and I discussed the differences in the Magento community between Europe and the US. I’ve noticed a sense that the US community is perhaps not as vibrant or as actively involved as the European community. Sanne highlighted the collaborative and trusting environment in the European Magento community, with agencies even working together despite being competitors.

This collaborative approach is inspiring, and it made me think about how we can foster a stronger sense of community in the US. Sanne’s advice to start small with Magento meetups and events is something I’d like to see more of. Maybe we need to embrace a more organic approach, starting with smaller, more focused events, rather than aiming for massive gatherings.

The Rise of MageOS: A Hope for Magento’s Future

Sanne and I also discussed the growing significance of MageOS, a community-driven initiative that aims to ensure the long-term viability of Magento. I was initially skeptical of the MageOS fork but have since changed my perspective. The lack of innovation in the core Magento product from Adobe is a concern for many in the community, and MageOS is a powerful response to this issue.

Sanne emphasized that MageOS empowers the community to drive innovation, which is crucial to Magento’s future. She believes that features currently available in Adobe Commerce, but potentially not prioritized in the future, can be incorporated into MageOS, offering Magento users a greater range of options. I agree that MageOS is an exciting development, and I’m eager to see how it shapes the future of the platform.

Conclusion: Embracing the Community & Innovation

The conversation with Sanne was insightful and inspiring. It reinforced the importance of community, innovation, and recognizing the need for more diversity in the Magento world. It’s clear that Magento is a dynamic platform with both challenges and opportunities.

Hyva offers a fantastic front-end solution for those seeking improved performance and developer efficiency. And MageOS presents a beacon of hope for the future of Magento, ensuring its continued relevance and innovation through a community-driven approach.

I highly recommend listening to the full podcast episode to gain a deeper understanding of Hyva, MageOS, and the current state of the Magento landscape. Thanks for joining me on this journey!

See these episodes for more insight into Hyva

7 Reasons Why the Hyvä Theme is a Game Changer for Magento

I’ll cover the fundamentals of the Hyvä theme, its innovative features, and the reasons behind its skyrocketing popularity. Get ready to learn how this game-changing theme is transforming the way we build and customize Magento stores, delivering unparalleled performance, streamlined development, and a cutting-edge technology stack. Stay tuned as we unravel the secrets behind the Hyvä revolution!

Magento Long Term Support

Contrary to rumors Magento Open Source is indeed alive and here to stay for a long time to come. Willem Wigman talks about the two different support models of Magento Open Source and how this will benefit the community.

Long Term Support from Adobe will be called the Magento Open Source LTS version. This is a very common practice in Open Source software. The Short Term Support or STS version of Magento will be supported by the community. We also talk about the benefits of a cleaner more streamlined version of Magento Open Source LTS and how this will increase the ROI of merchants all over the world using any version of Magento.

The Future of Magento with Vinai Kopp

What is the future of Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source? Vinai Kopp and Brent talk about the recent Adobe Developers Live Commerce conference and discuss the keynote. We talk about Mage-OS and how the community has stepped up to help Magento Open Source move faster into the future. We debunk speculation in social media and talk about how long-term and short-term support will work around Magento. The excellent news: Magento Open Souce is alive and well and will be for a long time

TRANSCRIPT

Brent: Welcome to this episode. Thank you I have Vinai Kopp is here. I’m going to let you introduce yourself today. Vinai and I have known each other for quite a long time, but why don’t you go ahead and tell us what you do day to day and maybe one of your passions.

Vinai: Right on. Thanks for having me, I’m the technical director at Hyva themes. So I worked very closely with Willem and all of our customers about more specifically developing the developers to do the implementations and try to make their lives as easy and fun as possible. And one of my passions, oh boy. I guess sleeping. Dog working out doing the stuff with a dog is fun. man trailing and all kinds of just fun stuff. It’s great. Traveling with a family is lovely. I really enjoy writing code. That’s passion still is. Okay, good. 

Brent: Yeah. I’ve had the opportunity to run with you and your dog and the mountains around Heidelberg, and it’s such a great experience.

Vinai: That was a very nice run 

Brent: So today I think let’s talk a little bit about the Hyva of theme and I think more, more, let’s talk about. Some of the things that are happening with Magento open source and Mage-OS. I think that would be some really interesting topics that resonate. Let’s start with let’s start with Mage-OS and, talk a little about open source.

Brent: I know there was an Adobe developer live conference on Friday last Friday, and that would have been February 11th. What, was your takeaways from that? 

Vinai: Yeah. Okay. For me, it was a very nice talk. I enjoyed it. Not just talks. I watched a couple of, and I didn’t watch everything. I just watched a couple of talks and presentations and this round table about Magento opensource and such.

Vinai: I liked it. The vibe within Adobe I’m enjoying is that it’s been a lot better than it used to be a couple of years ago, and they’re communicating a lot more which, helps me understand what’s happening. So that’s good. Even though you just asked me before we started recording, actually the keynote was a little misleading in part.

Vinai: A number of people reached out to me afterward and asked me about some of the statements that were made and at least from my understanding as part of the Magento open-source task force, where we talk extensively, not hours about these topics. Maybe the information given was a little incomplete, so I understand why people might’ve gotten the wrong impression there.

Vinai: One of the statements, for example, was that community open source handed over completely to the community. And that’s not true. What will happen at least according to the current plans as an expressed intent of Adobe is that Magento open-source as it is today will stay there as Magento open-source LTS.

Vinai: So long-term support, which has I have five years or whatever, support versions, very stable, absolute focus on security and stability because it’s the basis of their commercial offerings. And what they will be handing over to the community is a new distribution called STS Short Term Support. So this will not be officially supported on Adobe cloud.

Vinai: Probably it will be possible to install it and use. it Even though it just won’t be enough official distribution for, one. And that in fact will be owned by the community. It’s not quite clear who that will be. Will it be the Magento association or how that look like? But Adobe said they only will have a advisory role.

Vinai: No veto power or anything. So the community can in fact steer the way it should go, which is lovely. It’s pretty much exactly what we wanted to achieve with Mage-OS. And I’m very exciting. So I was very surprised when Adobe announced itself with a 180 turn. They’re so great. And a lot of things probably were being discussed internally before they announced this.

Vinai: So that’s one thing it’s not that open source is just handed over to the community and Adobe it’s okay, got rid of it. In fact, it’s going to be a whole new distribution. That’s in the hands of the community while the existing distributions will exist. And. Security features and new releases will flow back into STS and at the same time, any features that are developed and STS, and that are maybe then after a year or so are battle proven turn out to not cause big disruption and actually have tangible benefits for merchants.

Vinai: They can be cherry-picked back into LTS when there’s time for another release there. So there, these diversions are definitely not independent of each other, and there’s a vested interest on both sides to stay compatible to some degree I’d, even though I’m really looking forward to being able to innovate again, as part of the Magento Fork, and at least it’s hard not to speak about Magento STS.

Vinai: Because I’ve got pretty clear picture about Mage-OS, how that should be, you know what it’s for the value it will provide to merchants, to developers, to Adobe, to the ecosystem. It’s, maybe a bit premature. Trying to apply the same thoughts to the STS distribution, because that’s just not just Mage-OS. I’d But probably there’ll be some similarities.

Vinai: So I would be very excited to be able to help maybe steer some aspects of that into the direction that I personally find important, for example, make it more accessible for developers and the performance improvements, of course, et cetera. So many, things there to, do, to think about fun with. So that’s one part of it.

Vinai: The other part that you mentioned before we started recording again, was: Is Adobe going complete SaaS? Like Adobe Commerce going completely SaaS. I think what that was statement was intended to mean was that all new features that Adobe will be releasing for Adobe Commerce will be SaaS offerings, just like they have for the last couple of years.

Vinai: So everything around sensei. So Adobe analytics, product recommendation, search. I think those are the services they provide so far. They are SaaS offerings, but they only are usable with Adobe commerce because of the PHP stack, they built around it integrated into. Now in theory, they could be integrated into any commercial e-commerce offering, right?

Vinai: Not just Magento They’re SaaS offerings after all. But Adobe commerce will be built on the PHP stack. So it’s not like it’s completely SaaS now for the years to, for many years to come as the official statement. So nobody knows for how long pretty long as my expectation, right? It will speed pretty much what we’ve got right now.

Vinai: We have the stable PHP core and then SaaS offerings being built on top of this. And this is actually great because. Nobody likes breaking upgrades. It’s just doing work without getting any benefit out of it. So having a stable core is awesome for everybody developers have much more fun building new stuff, merchants don’t want to pay without getting something in return for development work and development hours.

Vinai: So this idea that we were proposing for Magento open source from the beginning for Mage-OS that is, and now also I think hopefully will be adopted for for the STS release, is that the same approach has followed. So any new features are developed as extensions, so to speak, right? It doesn’t have to be SaaS offerings, but they won’t be part of the core, so to speak.

Vinai: But that external extensions, which then can be added in, and the only difference is such a service or feature could be running inside of the same PHP process. So that would be the in-process customization. And as we develop as know and love. Or it could be a SaaS offering like Adobe offers it now, in case of Adobe, those could be customized through the thing called Adobe IO, formerly Firefly, et cetera, but there’s just for the SaaS offerings.

Vinai: So all the existing customizability of Magento still exists. And that’s great because we had the home module ecosystem and develop practice system around that. So maybe that clarifies things a bit. 

Brent: I want to just break this down a little bit now. Cause we, when we went through a lot of things and I, did not have an opportunity to see the live broadcast.

Brent: But the The LTS and STS, I think obviously has confused a lot of people when, I read a few notes from, somebody that sent me here’s what’s happening, they said Magento’s going open source. Magento is going, SaaS was the first statement. And the Magento Association is going to take over the Magento open source.

Brent: These are some big statements. And I was like, wow where did this all come from? And I started doing some searching and I couldn’t find anything about it. So I think your clarification has made it much easier to understand. And then Willem did go through the LTS and STS with me.

Brent: And that also makes perfect sense. I do feel like maybe they did dump a whole lot in a keynote on the community. And I’m a little bit perturbed that it’s going to take three weeks for this recording to come back out. I feel like maybe there was some misinterpretations of this news and it hasn’t spread widely.

Brent: I just want to go back to open source and let’s talk directly about STS LTS. And so it’s clear right now, Magento is going to control the open source core of Magento. Adobe is going to control the open source core of Magento. It’s going to be called long LTS long-term support. And another entity at some point is going to get control over the fork, which is going to be this short-term support, which is going to be more of the innovative space that’s going to happen.

Brent: Would that be a good 

Vinai: We’ll be able to adopt newer PHP versions much, much quicker. Include improvements that have a high priority for community better caching, better session handling. For Adobe, they didn’t have a high priority because of maybe focus on Adobe commerce, cloud or stability.

Vinai: There’s much more room to maneuver there for innovations. 

Brent: Think some of the things you’ve talked about and one of the things they did they announce earlier was they’re going to decouple all the core features, all the third party modules like PayPal and Dotdigital.

Brent: All those are going to get removed from the core. And we’re going to end up with just Magento, which I think is a great idea in that part. Alright. Again, just to explain to the listeners LTS is going to be a a version of Magento that is a core version. That’s going to reside as an open source version for everybody to use.

Brent: It’s not going away. It is still going to be the core of Adobe Commerce. And Adobe commerce. Theoretically, what they’re saying is they’re not going to bundle a lot of new functions into the core of Magento, but rather depend on third parties and more likely from Adobe anyways, SaaS services to attach to it.

Brent: That a good, a easy way to say it. Okay. Absolutely. If we then talk just briefly about the SaaS, Because I heard a lot of people say Magento is going SaaS, right? I don’t know how that could have been misinterpreted. I guess I do know how it could have gotten misinterpreted.

Brent: It sounds like all the new features are going to be SaaS, but the core of Magento. As we know it, there’s no plans at the moment to make it go SaaS. And it would really have to be a brand new refactoring of Magento or Adobe commerce before it could possibly go completely SaaS 

Vinai: so complete speculation here, but my guess is something like that will come at one point in time, maybe.

Vinai: But everybody within Adobe says many years to come, whatever that means, right until that we’ll be ready. So until then they will be reliant and dependent on the PHP version for many years to come. And also even after this new product finally has been realized this complete SaaS commerce offering. They have a lot of existing customers on Magento, as we currently know it and they will still need to be supported.

Vinai: So that will take another how it is, software never dies and we have still have Magento one and what’s called oh, it’s commerce hanging around. It’s still we’ll still have Magento two sides on PHP in 10 years. Officially supported by Adobe, 

Brent: yeah. And I think the, realization to have this SaaS offering, it will be something that competes in the enterprise space when it’s ready.

Brent: And I’m guessing five years from now, it’ll be ready. Ideally it would be cool if they had three versions, they had a SaaS, they had a on-prem and they had an open source. With the open source, always underlying core that’s pushing forward. All the core features that are made Magento. And there’s no reason why a SaaS version couldn’t be PHP.

Brent: I think Akeneo has a SaaS version. That’s PHP Shopware has a SaaS version that’s PHP. Let’s, not speculate too much, but I think just to help people understand what was put out there on Friday The peripherals of Magento as we see them, or as Adobe commerce, sorry.

Brent: As we see them are going to be SaaS. And I guess the good news for that is that anybody has open source would now have options to bring in some of the enterprise SaaS features that Adobe commerce is offering 

Vinai: theoretically will be decides to offer them to. Open source merchants running on source, sure.

Vinai: So there’s no technical reason not to only business reasons. Hey, we want to have it exclusive for commerce, which I don’t know, but they’re all, always other offerings too. Companies like Nasto offering product recommendations and other search streetwise, et cetera. So there are many options, competitors, so to speak of the Adobe offerings, which are of course, open to any open source merchant too.

Brent: And I think all of these, a lot of these extension companies Shipper HQ is a great example of who decided that they were going to go SaaS early on. They’ve had big success in doing that. And I don’t think because some of that the processing is done outside of Magento doesn’t necessarily mean

Brent: that it’s going to stop you from making some customizations that you want around that. If we think about how Magento works, there is an extension that usually talks to a SaaS provider.. And then the SaaS provider does its work and it comes back right. At a minimum, you can just connect with restful or you have some basic connections where it would do everything, but generally we’d have some extension.

Brent: You would install that extension would do the communications. If there’s any rules that we want to build, we could build into that extension. That’s outside of the SaaS. And I guess we would call that microservices, right? If we’re truly SaaS, you’d have to have all these different microservices that are residing outside and you’d have to manage all those things.

Vinai: I don’t know how micro to these servicesare, but services. And that’s exactly how the Adobe SaaS offerings integrate into Magento commerce to exactly. Just like you said. So no 

Brent: difference. Yeah. And I think too I guess there are going to be Adobe extensions that you would install.

Brent: And I’m thinking specifically of the new Adobe payments, which is an extension you install, but the bulk of the work is done outside of Adobe commerce. And it is open to, it is open to open source clients. Interesting that a lot of the extension updates, because they said the extension is partially written in react.

Brent: The extension updates can be pushed to the extension from Adobe. 

Vinai: Yeah. Then it has to be hosted somewhere like the JavaScript code needs to be pulled in from some server environment controlled by. Adobe in that case. So they just update the file server, which then gets loaded into the browser.

Vinai: That’s the only way to do that because they are unable to update the code running on a server, unless of course they own the server tooling with a cloud. So that would be another story. But Yeah, it’s everybody’s has the same tools at their disposal as a technological tool. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Adobe, whether it’s a third party SaaS provider, whether it’s an in-house team, Adobe obviously has a bit of.

Vinai: Power in terms of manpower, they can put behind some, things and unify a lot of offering. And there certainly is a benefit in that, but they still have to build stuff with the same technology everybody else see what’s 

Brent: so I think some of the things I’m hearing is that you’re, excited or let’s call it bullish about this LTS/STS Model.

Brent: And it’s going to be a good path forward for the years to come, at least in the short-term at least five years in the long-term 10 years, right? 

Vinai: Yeah, I am. Your guess about the timeframes as good as mine. That said I, my idea is probably something similar yet. I think probably not too far off, but again I, have no idea.

Vinai: I don’t know no additional information now because Adobe had big collaborations. They’ve got legal. They’ve got a ton of teams, a lot of different departments that have to be involved, product ownership, marketing, API’s, strategy, leadership, whatever that means. So, many people, so many aspects it’ll take some time.

Vinai: It won’t be here tomorrow. I have no clue how long it’ll take. It does seem like Adobe is interested in making that happen as quick as possible, as quickly as possible. So I can have no. Impression of anybody’s stalling, this and this is I’m talking here. Being part of this Magento open-source task force, right?

Vinai: So we meet every two weeks and get to talk with other members of the community who are interested in the future of open source and also five or six people from Adobe were there all the time. So we talk about different aspects of this and try to find the best path forward. And that’s what this is. So it’ll take some time.

Vinai: And in the meanwhile, we, from the Magento opensource community Alliance, we’ll continue to build out the Mage-OS distributions and everything that we’re doing there, I believe will seed and directly into the STS version. Because we’re learning. Building this and all that knowledge will serve being able to have a community run Magento version, even with the guidance from Adobe, it doesn’t hurt learning.

Vinai: Things are never going to so we are not dependent on Adobe. And that’s the one thing I keep, repeating. And it’s one of my main motivations there. I think it’s pretty important to be independent, to be able to make our own decisions without having to wait for others. And so far everything that.

Vinai: Has greatly just only good things have come from it. Look at what we’re getting. We’re getting STS version. We have a lot more communication with Adobe. The whole vibe is shifting around Magento. We have a lot more clarity about where Magento’s headed, et cetera. So I believe if we could continue to do this.

Vinai: Good things will come. 

Brent: All yeah. So I want to shift gears. Let’s I want to close out this Mage-OS thing. If you’re a listener and and you’re not technical, don’t worry Magento’s around. 

Brent: I, want to just dive when it just one small technical talk, but really quick.

Brent: So I did see, I think he’s a Magento master and I should know his name, but he talked about integrating the UCT, the upgrade compatibility tool into the build of. Of every build of Magento. I think that’s exciting and I think more people should use this upgrade compatibility tool as well as just the multi, the testing framework.

Brent: I can’t express more that developers need to be using some of the tools that are out there. Have you used the upgrade compared to the UCT tool at 

Vinai: all? Not an anger. I’ve just used it on. It’s a code base that I work on, but because I’m working with that product company, Hyva, it’s not like we have our own sites.

Vinai: Like I’m not a merchant in effect. I work for merchants, so it’s slightly different, but yeah, it’s good. This upgrade compatibility tool is helpful. I wouldn’t consider it a goal to be a hundred percent green because that severely limits what can be done, but it’s super useful. And that it shows where to pay extra attention during upgrades.

Vinai: Chances are depending on how the code is written, it will still work. But it’s, it just gives a indicational where, and get them started. 

Brent: Good. All right, so let’s move on to the Magento association. So the you’re part of the open source task force, right? Is that what it’s called now? The open source task force.

Brent: I’m on the membership committee. So I can share my news from our meeting yesterday. And you can share your news how’s that you share your news first. What’s the news on the open source taskforce 

Vinai: then use all the open source taskforce is that we’re trying to. Figure out how to make this STS version happen as good as possible.

Vinai: First Adobe has to figure some stuff out internally, but once it’s ripened a little bit we want everybody on this task force, once a joint efforts, they’re realizing that in fact, a lot of the work will be up to the community. And with as all things open source, the people who show up and do the work, they’re the one who counts.

Vinai: So it doesn’t matter about how’s things. How groups of people as are, should look, it’s just whoever’s there and does it. Yeah, I hope many more people will turn up, but the same with this open source task group at the beginning, we’re a lot more people. After sometimes some people just stopped going.

Vinai: Maybe they thought nothing would come out of it or don’t have time or last happened. I realize now we live in a world where things do happen that make Magento seem less important. So I understand, but we need the people who are willing to show up and do the work, and we want to encourage people to join.

Vinai: So that’s what we talked 

Brent: about. One thing I’ve seen from this task force is the lack of representation from people outside Europe. 

Vinai: Wait, so you’re talking about Mage-OS I think those are the task force is the committee of the Magento association. Yeah. Yes. So a Mage-OS. Yes, it absolutely you’re right.

Vinai: The U S was underrepresented and many other parts of the world. Okay. And the reason for that and you, guessed correctly. You’ve talked about that before. It’s just, we want it to move fast and moving faster, easier with a smaller group. Yeah. Now we’re at a point see we have, we almost have a release ready, and once that’s ready, we will open up the group and we’ll open up the GitHub repository and invite people to.

Vinai: It’s super important, what people have to participate, but then we have something, we’re not just people talking about stuff and we’ve got something. Yeah that’s super exciting and I’m looking forward to many people joining like us and other people, other parks, we need that. 

Brent: Just to clarify and I started to add some confusion. Magento open-source taskforce is five people from Adobe and five community members that are working on how are they going to make this all work? The open source version, and what’s going to happen. The Mage-OS, the Mosca is a group of people that are actually working on making it work.

Brent: Is that a good way to describe it? 

Vinai: Yeah. Started earlier. Thus whole STS version only happened because. Oh, what the open letter that this community lines, European centric group published and yeah, so that’s how it started, but it’s not going to stay that way. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It’s confusing from the outside.

Vinai: I wouldn’t have a clue. What’s going on a Magento association. We have. We have Magento open source. Now we have Magento opens on LTS and STS, and then we have major multiple distributions and we have too much who can understand all that stuff. But I did it the company in real time. Yeah. So hopefully everything will just merge together over time.

Brent: Yeah. All right. So from the membership side, then the Magento association is going to have a paid model. And at first, what you’ll get from paying is you’ll have the right to vote for the board and the board voting is out now. I think it’s starting. And I think I think that there has been quite a shift in the community and, people are looking for new board members.

Brent: I think they’re looking for March 1st to start, it’s going to be on Patrion that they’re looking to to March 1st to start the member drive to get people to join the Magento association. And it’ll be I won’t say I won’t have any, I won’t say any prices yet because nothing has been confirmed, but th there should be some affordability in there as well.

Brent: It’ll be very similar to what Drupal’s doing. And the pricing will be the pricing to join will be lower than what Drupal has. And the first benefit is that you’ll be able to vote for the board of the board for Magento association. That’s my big thing. Yeah, I, yeah. And I think one of the things is that people have, complained from that the Adobe side it’s not been transparent and communicative and they had Magento association side has been slow in communicating.

Brent: So I think what we’re seeing is each of these committees is happening and I’m taking some responsibility on telling the world what’s happening in our current. I, wrote a blog post about our meeting in January. That should be out pretty soon. Now I’m going to write a media blog post about our meeting for February.

Brent: And honestly, to just the time to get that blog, post approved is quite quite a long stretch. It’s not like you just record it and get it live right away. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of red tape and I’m learning that. Part of it is that the community has to be okay with some of this red tape.

Brent: And I think what you’ve said earlier about Mosca and how you wanted to make it happen faster, I think that’s a great decision to make that work, because if you do open it up to the whole community, now you have multiple, people who want to do different things and you, you can never get anything.

Vinai: Do you remember last September and meet Magento, Poland. The discussions that were happening there, the board paid membership and everything. So it was cool to see this come to fruition. Very nice. Also back then Matias from Typo3, he said, okay, if you start to open things up, what will happen is a lot of people will attend the first two meetings now be 

Vinai: back to

Vinai: fraction and those are the important ones.

Vinai: So don’t spend too much time making everything too transparent and easy. Because too much effort there isn’t worth it. And back then, I it would be nice if we just had hundreds of people working overtime, getting everything done, we just yeah, I think that’s just not how it’s going to work.

Vinai: He has a lot of experience in that 

Brent: areas. Yeah, I know I saw some of those. I saw some of his tweets or I think that there were tweets or LinkedIn, but I think there are tweets anyways. I just want to reassure people from the Magento association side and by the way, go to Magento association.org forward slash join and join today.

Brent: That things are happening there. Things are happening on the open source tasks. We’ll have some great news on the events committee. Things are happening on the events side. There’s going to be more meat Magento’s coming. There’s things happening from the membership side.

Brent: And I’m just going to continue to push that Magento association has a place on their website to tell us what each of these committees is doing. I do feel like it’s not like we’re working towards transparency, but it would be great to ha to even publish the meeting notes. As a transcript.

Brent: I don’t know why not right? This isn’t, there’s nothing happening in these meetings. That can’t be, we don’t sign an NDA and we don’t say, no, you can’t say this to anybody. So why can’t we talk at least talk about it. I think if we don’t do that, then we also end up with speculation. Like we did from last Friday’s conference where the keynote is saying Magento is going SaaS.

Brent: And everybody starts getting confused. 

Vinai: Yeah. Would it be helpful to know. To be able to refer back to, okay. What’s actually going on if needed. Probably most people won’t watch that because we all busy and. No more meetings oh yes. I want to watch more 

Brent: meetings. Yeah. I think he just said from a news standpoint, even from a transcript standpoint, if you Google, like I like right after I saw those notes, I’m like, I started Googling Magento, going open source and Adobe commerce open-source and Magento Adobe commerce, all SaaS and nothing’s out there.

Brent: There’s nothing, there’s no news about it. So then I’m like maybe there’s a misinterpretation of what the person said. Yeah. All right. We are going to have to do a second episode because we’re running out of time for your Hyva talk, but I think let’s, briefly dive into Hyva and I think that we should do a second episode specifically on the reason why people should, we should implore people to have faster websites.

Brent: I think that should be the topic. If you happen to be on Magento, Hyva is a great option. And we’ve just launched our first client on the Hyva theme it’s taken us a while, a live one. So we’re excited about it. And we’re seeing great things. And every, meeting I’m in this, shouldn’t be a Hyva commercial, but it’s going to be every meeting I’m in.

Brent: I pitch Hyva and say that there’s no better way to improve their ROI on a website than to increase the site. Speed. So tell us, maybe give us some updates. We have five, 10 minutes. Now give us some updates on Hyva and tell us what’s happening. 

Vinai: So much it’s happening, all the things, all the good stuff’s happening in particular things that I’ve been working on a lot.

Vinai: Extension compatibility. We now have a number of extension vendors. Join Hyva. We are committed to supporting all their extensions, making them compatible. So they work out of the box on Hyva installs. We have some early adopters like red chants and Tuma with great extensions. So they all have their extension are compatible.

Vinai: And now we can seeing more larger major extension vendors join like mate, we just renounced a tech partnership with Magewerks and WebKuul coming. They have a lot of compatible extensions. So that’s great seeing that these extension vendors see the benefit in making the extension compatible.

Vinai: So we have more than a hundred compatible extensions. Some are listed in the Hyva compatibility tracker. Some are compatible out of the box, so no need to install additional extensions just provided by the vendor directly. And that’s been great. So I’ve been recording videos on how to make this compatibility model.

Vinai: I’ve been writing a lot of documentations. We’ve made the documentations public, which has been requested a lot, so people can inform themselves before actually starting out purchasing a license. So that’s done now at docs hyva.io, and that’s. What I’m trying to do, basically making the life of extension developers more pleasant and making life easier for merchants because all the extensions they want to work with, they just work.

Vinai: So that’s good. A lot of extension vendors have been following. Lead off Magento, creating better extensions in a way that they weren’t built for Luma. So building a ton of small JavaScript files, and that’s exactly the opposite of what we work, how we work in Hyva. But there’s a reason for right there.

Vinai: Any Google page metric, just. It just doesn’t pay having, this required JS based front end. So having small inland JavaScript is great. People love it. Customers love it. It’s super fast. Yeah, we have to adjust the way we ride these modules. And that’s what I try to add in. Developers. 

Brent: That’s great.

Brent: Yeah. So I I’ve been again I’ve been pitching the fact that Hyva was going to improve your web vital scores. It would be great. And I’ll give you some idea that I had, it would be great. If on the Hyva site on your hyva.io site, you have some kind of. Check right.

Brent: With a with the theoretical. If you switched your theme, what your score could be. So like you punch in your URL. It does a quick calculation, which it’s an open, it’s an open API for the vitals. All you do is show that performance score. Like for example, I just did a test on on, yesterday on a client and it came back as a 17 on their performance score.

Brent: And I have a script on my computer that I run. So I just put in lighthouse URL, boom. It gives me a little report and I can share it right with the client. It would be cool to say, and that you would say here’s your score? 17. Theoretically, if you, it you’d know that it’s going to improve it just by removing all that JavaScript.

Brent: It’ll improve it by 50 or 70%, whatever it is. So it’d go to 65 or something and knowing that they still have still a lot more work to do, but you can give them some scores. I, can equate this to there’s some marathons that you can do that are downhill marathons, and they always say, if your marathon was a four hour marathon at Chicago, if you do this marathon, you’re going to do a 3:30.

Brent: Okay. You, can extrapolate the idea of performance gains from a benchmark that you would get in general. And of course you would say, this is not really going to happen. This is all theoretical, but you will see an improvement and improvement could be as much as this.

Brent: Absolutely. Yeah, it’d be a good selling tool. 

Vinai: On average, if we take the customers where we have numbers, who went from Luma to Hyva, the medium amount they improved by is X. Then we could apply that there, maybe something like that. We, could, it would be tricky if people then would try to. Take that as a a promise, it didn’t work.

Vinai: You still are using this super expensive chat, live chat or whatever that ruins all the page metrics, no matter what page you set up with an excuse. It depends as always, but yeah, I like the idea of being able. Just immediately present some kind of 

Brent: assaults there. Yeah. And then I think some, big some benchmarks some, key benchmarks and, having some success stories on, your site, you already have some success stories, but actually rolling them out with big, huge numbers and graphics.

Brent: Like some marketing directors like to see and CEOs like. They like to see a 56% improvement in load time or 120% improvement in a thousand percent. You know what I mean? Like those are the things that people like to see. I didn’t want to make this a marketing session, but 

Vinai: thanks for this free consultation, I’m working on a new site and we were just missing a bit of the content.

Vinai: It looks great. I can’t wait till it’s finally live. So there’ll be more stuff. It’s coming. It’s almost there. I really would like to have somebody on board who focusing focuses on producing that kind of content it’s would be really helpful. Yeah. You got a job 

Brent: good. So let’s, close out today.

Brent: I think that that there is some effort to get more content from Mage-OS. I think we had a meeting earlier and getting the community to be involved in helping to develop some of that content. So why don’t you just talk briefly about what you’re working on? Sure 

Vinai: the background is Adobe removed the domain, Magento.com and redirect all traffic to their Adobe commerce, adobe.com landing page.

Vinai: And I was pretty disappointed about, and I think that’s a super bad idea. It’s bad for everybody who built their business around Magento and gender opensource named Magento. And it’s. Harsh. I dunno, it’s not good. So I think the decision was made, and that was also confirmed from speaking to people inside of Adobe, that people who don’t understand and to not have the full picture.

Vinai: And that just happens with a large company like Adobe. So hopefully, maybe something will change. I have no idea, but fact is at the moment, if somebody wants to get formed about Magento open source, If they don’t know that already, what do they do? There’s no magento.com. They just go to a page on Adobe side, selling them to Adobe commerce, which is it’s just explaining how that’s built on top of Open-Source.

Vinai: Is beyond what most people want to know. So we need something there because it’s possible to create wildly successful websites on Magento. Open-source so many people are making doing great. And that’s why we decided are the Mage-OS group to put up content around Magento, open source. Targeted at merchants former.

Vinai: So they’re able to inform themselves so description what it is comparisons to Adobe commerce, for example case studies maybe insights into a specific features that are offered here. I don’t know, for example, page builder because that’s it’s feature that got rolled over from commerce to open.

Vinai: So things like that, that interest merchants who might consider it. So that should come out as fast as possible. And hopefully somebody else like the Magento association or Adobe will also do something, but experience has shown they move slower. So trying to get something done. And as soon as something else is there.

Vinai: The, if that’s better. I think everybody would be happy to contribute the content there too. So it’s just important to get the content out there because so many people’s livelihood is built around Magento and not Adobe 

Brent: commerce. Yeah, I agree. So I just closing out today a couple of key points and I just want to key in, on Magento open source.

Brent: And I think that we have to continually talk to the leadership at Adobe and let them know how important those customers are and what a great funnel they. To getting to Adobe commerce. So everybody on Magento opensource is a great candidate for Adobe commerce, in opensource isn’t necessarily right for Adobe commerce.

Brent: Because it there’s certain things. Clients don’t need. But everybody could be right for Adobe or for Magento open source. And if leadership understands the more they invest in the open source side of it, the more potential clients they have that will move to Adobe commerce, the right type of clients Adobe wants.

Brent: And I know. That Adobe wants people that fit into their suite, right? They want people that would maybe get AEM that would get Adobe target to get Adobe analytics. They’d like to have people that fit into that Adobe, experience suite, which includes Adobe commerce. This is a great vehicle for Adobe to get clients upstream into where they would like to see them.

Brent: And I also would agree that decoupling some of these things that were. Some of the third party modules that were product core, we’ll make upgrades easier and make the experience that some Magento open-source users have had where upgrades have been a little bit more difficult and, they’re costly, right?

Brent: So slimming down the core and making it really, great and making the core. Easily upgradable is going to help the open source users to to have a larger ROI on their investment. Yeah, the key here though, is we just need to keep pounding in that Adobe can’t forget open source and it’s not a competition to Adobe commerce.

Brent: The way Adobe commerce is positioning themselves are for big business. There’s no, absolutely no focus on medium and small business. So why don’t they continue to focus on it by letting them use open source? 

Brent: There’s some great folks inside of Adobe. Eric Erway, Nicole Khan Nelson Mineola.

Brent: Come on Chris, John Pasha talk HockeyApp I think it is not quite sure how to pronounce their names. Apologies, but they are great. They’re really working hard on increasing awareness and aside of adult. And we can see that it’s happening through the relaunch that we’re seeing now. So they’re also on the source task force.

Brent: So it’s not just us having to talk to it over leadership. We have to do that. You need to do that, but there also are good fonts inside of Adobe. 

Brent: Yeah. Good. Vinai. We’re going to have to schedule another. Just performance interview and talk specifically about how you make your website faster and that will of course lead into

Brent: But thank you for today. It’s been a very enjoyable conversation. I’m going to get the transcript out on this one right away, so people can read it as well. And and let’s do another one where you can let’s do it. We should do an episode when we’re all ready to, display how easy it is to install Mage-OS I think that’s a fantastic idea.

Brent: Yeah. 

Vinai: Yeah, let’s do that 

Brent: one again. Alright. Thanks so 

Vinai: much. Okay. Thank you to Brent. Yeah, take care. Thanks for having me. Bye bye.

The Dream Job for a Developer, Hyva Projects with Danny Verkade

This week we interview Danny Verkade with Cream. Danny is the CTO of Cream, a leading Magento agency in the Netherlands. He is also on the Magento Association Board.

We discuss his experience with the new Hyva theme and how it fits into the Magento ecosystem. We go over some of the tools that merchants can use to constantly evaluate the performance of their website. We talk about how someone can easily get into Hyva and why they should!

We finish up with some conversation about the Magento Association and the future of events, big and small. Hyva website delivered: https://vollebregtaanhangwagens.nl Reading: https://techcrunch.com

This episode was recorded on July 21st, 2021

How Hyva can Reduce Your Time to Market on Magento by 75%

This week we interview Monika Milewska and Antoni Paszkow (who is no stranger to the subject of self-defense).

They are with the Magento development company Magently in Poland. We discuss their recent store launch of https://www.partcatalog.com/ on the Hyva theme. We learned that the time to develop the new theme in Hyva was half that of a new theme in the Blank theme during their Magento1 to Magento2 migration.

Antoni shares his developer experience, and Monika gives us some great performance numbers. They started with a score of 10 on Mobile and ended up with a score of 97!

What is Hyva?

Hyvä comes from the Finnish language and literally means “good”. But also “desirable” and “advisable”. Here’s how it’s pronounced.

We didn’t name our company Hyvä because we think we are that good, it has an intrinsic meaning that’s embedded into our work. We set out to build the best Magento products we possibly can. We want to build products that are really really good. “Said Willem Wigman Founder and creator of Hyvä Themes.”

Our products bring value to merchants, developers, agencies, and ultimately: end-users for your Magento-based website.

How Hyva reduces the time to market

By reducing the amount of Javascript on the site and simplifying the frontend development process, Hyva can reduce your time to market by 4-5 times. This allows developers to use the tools they need on the pages they need them rather than making every page use every tool every time.

This not only increases the performance of the developer, but it also increases the performance of the website dramatically!

Why Magento needs a new theme

The original Magento 2 theme was developed in the early 2010s and has not been updated from a framework/technical standpoint since the launch of Magento 2 in late 2015. In the last 5-6 years the technology and shifted and improved and Magento has not followed. In addition, Adobe Commerce is now focusing all its efforts on the Progressive Web App Studio. This means that the base theme is only getting security updates. The default, out-of-the-box Magento theme is sadly fallen by the wayside and will not be enhanced or upgraded.

Some highlights are as follows:

  • Reduced Complexity. Hyvä Magento 2 themes are powerful and feature-rich but yet simple. Reduced complexity is the number one principle they incorporate.  
  • Enhanced Performance. E-commerce shoppers never forget slow websites. Therefore, fast-working web pages are another goal hidden behind all Hyvä products. To achieve it, these Magento 2 themes incorporate the principle of enhanced performance and increased efficiency. 
  • Improved Developer Experience. A developer-friendly work-environment is also among the benefits of Hyvä Magento 2 themes. 
  • Improved Development Velocity. Reduced complexity multiplied by good work conditions let your coders implement and customize Hyvä Magento 2 themes much faster than other similar solutions. As a result, you reduce average time-to-market metrics and costs.
  • Reduced Dependencies. As we’ve just mentioned above, Hyvä Magento 2 themes contain only two dependencies. Thus, they are way more reliable than most alternative solutions.
  • Reduced Learning Curve. All the principles mentioned above let you reduce the learning curve necessary to master Hyvä Magento 2 themes. It won’t take much time until you become a specialist in the Hyvä Magento 2 themes development

You can learn more about developing on the Hyva theme here at Rock Technolabs.

Magento Hyva theme with Vinai Kopp

Welcome to Talk Commerce, where we explore how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce and the communities they work and live in. This week we interview Vinai Kopp who is a big advocate of the new Hyva theme. We discuss why Hyva makes sense for every developer, agency, and merchant. Vinai gives us reasons why Agencies need to embrace Hyva and get their teams on board. He also talks about the benefits for the merchant to use it. We go into the differences between PWA and a monolith and dive into microservices. All this while not getting too technical. You have to listen to this episode to hear Vinai’s opinion on PWA vs Hyva! This episode was recorded on July 7th, 2021

Vinai Kopp talks about the Hyva Theme

Why the Hyva theme matters in Magento with Willem Wigman

We interview Willem Wigman with Hyva, the revolutionary new Magento theme that will change your life! Did I say change your life? Yes, this shows how powerful the Magento community is and continues to be! We talk about the origin of the name, not to spoil anything, but it’s good. We discuss the impact on site speed for merchants and how Google is changing the game for your website, and how it is ranked. If you are a merchant, you need to share this episode. If you are an Agency, you need to get on board with Hyva and get your Devs teams there too.

This episode was recorded on June 9th, 2021

We learn how to pronounce Hyva from Willem Wigman

Jisse Reitsma | Training on PWA, Vue and Hyva – Tech Edition

Welcome to Talk Commerce a Tech Edition Special. Where we talk about how merchants, agencies, and developers experience commerce. This week we interview Jisse Reitsma, with Yireo. We focus on developer training on React, Vue, or the new Magento Hyva Theme. We look at training from the Merchant, agency, and developer perspectives. Jisse gives us actionable feedback for training on what to ask as a developer, what an Agency should look for, and what a merchant should expect. Did you know that Jisse is an accomplished Pianist? (He plays Chopin!) We talk about how open source is not free and close it out with a little bit of Hyva and more pronunciations. Brent tries out his new portal podcasting system with mixed results. (Please send me your comments!) This episode was recorded on June 4th, 2021

Jisse Reitsma talk Hyva
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