Reshaping our business plan

We never see Yireo as a static entity: We always see it as an ever-changing brain-thing that follows us - Yireo team members. Because we personally have become very enthousiastic about Magento 2, Yireo as a business will follow as well.

That said, we have been reshaping Yireo in the last years to focus more on extension development and training, and less on custom projects. So, you guessed it, we'll focus on Magento 2 extensions and Magento 2 training.

Our Magento 2 trainings

On January 22nd, we organize - together with great partners like Zend, New Relic, Varnish and of course Magento itself - a great seminar around Magento 2. Magento 2 is a great technical product, but it requires time and knowledge to get used to it and implement it in the correct way. The seminar gives you a great kick start with knowing what needs to be done to migrate to Magento 2 and to make Magento 2 success for yourself. It will also offer a great opportunity to meetup with gods, gurus and friends.

In line with this, we are planning to schedule various technical trainings in Q1 and Q2 of 2016. For instance, we will offer technical merchant trainings, for Magento 2 shop owners that want to customize their own shops as much as possible (XML layout, upgrades, shell jobs, application modes, git, quality checks). Also we will offer various Magento 2 development tracks for Magento theming (XML layout, PHTML, Block classes, RequireJS) and backend development (Dependency Injection, XML preferences, Plugins, events and observers). If you have ever attended a Yireo training, you will know that you will get top notch quality with all this!

Our Magento 2 extensions

Because of the Magento 2 Seminar mentioned earlier, we have been very busy and were only able to work on Magento 2 extensions at night. As soon as the seminar is there, we will shift our focus to extension development - big time. Currently, we maintain about 60 Magento v1 extensions. The plan is to migrate at least 40 of them to Magento 2. At this moment, 2 extensions have been completed fully, while 3 more commercial extensions are almost ready.

February and March 2016 will be our big development months as for extension development. After that, we will pick one (legacy?) Magento 1 extension at a time and see how and why that extension should be migrated to Magento 2. Some extensions will simply be phased out, because with M2 their functionality will no longer be required.

Small note on MageBridge

With MageBridge, we take a different stance: So far, the Joomla side of MageBridge has been composed of numerous extensions (counting about 70 extensions all compatible wit Joomla 3). However, the Magento side of MageBridge is quite monolithic. With Magento 2, we will definitely work on migrating part of the code to be compatible, but our most important aim will be to make it less monolithic and more modular.

For instance, some people simply want a Single Sign On or Single Sign In, instead of a full visual integration. Some others only want the integration of search to work, redirecting the search results for Joomla content to Joomla, and the search results for Magento catalogs to Magento. Each functionality will be contained in its own Magento 2 module. In the end, this will be a work in progress - spread across the entire year 2016 - with most likely authentication (SSI and SSO) to be picked up first.

Until all the work is done, we will be unable to tell you whether all of the current state of MageBridge will be compatible with Magento 2. Yet again, we will definitely make a lot of MageBridge functionality available under Magento 2 and you are welcome to think or help along.