Sole focus on Magento 2

Let's start with the obvious: Yireo has slowly been shifting from Joomla to Magento, but with the arrival of Magento 2, this change went much more rapid than we initially planned. And Magento 1 is outdated. So in 2018, we will be focusing on Magento 2 (and related technologies). We have been doing the same thing in 2017 already, we will keep doing the same in 2018.

Dropping Magento 1?

Our intention is to drop Magento 1, simply because maintaining extensions and services for both Magento 1 and Magento 2 is too hard. On top of this, we believe Magento 2 to be much better than Magento 1. However, we have a large set of Magento 1 extensions that we will still maintain for the next upcoming years. We will work on migrating most of those extensions to Magento 2 - something we have said before, but we'll definitely make progress soon.

Dropping Joomla!

In the previous year 2017, we were less and less active with Joomla - not intentionally, it was just the way things came to be. We expect this to be true for 2018. Because of this, we will be dropping the majority of our Joomla extensions, we will no longer offer any Joomla services and we will stop organizing Joomla developer trainings (which were never a major success anyway).

Expanding on nice PHP stuff

While the major platforms offer us a solid way of doing business, the separate tools, frameworks and platforms have our attention as well. As a PHP developer, you know about Laravel. However, while we have built an internal monitoring system, a CRM and a simple site with that, we tend to like the smaller PHP frameworks even more: Especially Zend Expressive and Slim are tools that we will work with a lot more: Small conference sites, parts of our main sites (blog, services) - they are slowly replaced with separate satellite sites.

Frontend technology, JavaScript

And then there is the frontend stuff: In the area of frontend development, things are on the move. Not only because of things like LESS, SASS, BEM, imaging techniques and browser capabilities. But JavaScript is playing a more prominent role every day.

The major CMS-es have already made plans (WordPress with React, Drupal with React, Joomla with Vue) and now Magento will also focus on React with their upcoming PWA Studio. This determines the future of Yireo as well: We have already worked intensely with the current JavaScript scope of Magento 2 (KnockoutJS, RequireJS) but are playing heavily now with React, Redux and JSX. Simply said, we will do a lot more with JavaScript soon. (And we have already scheduled the first set of JavaScript trainings.)

Reacticon - March 16-17th 2018

Obviously, this paves the way for a nice Magento conference: March 16th and March 17th, we will organize - together with Magento itself and Deity - a Magento developer conference focused on React and PWA: Reacticon. This is the first conference of its kind and it will allow Magento backenders and frontenders to prepare for the upcoming changes with PWA Studio.

Besides this great conference - which is only 2 months away - we are also looking forward to all of the other Magento events: MageTitans Groningen (Netherlands), Imagine (Las Vegas), all of the other MageTitans and MeetMagento conferences. And perhaps, perhaps, there might be another MageTestFest somewhere in Europe.

Trainings, consultancy - helping developers

That covers the technology. And the major shift towards JavaScript also determines how we do business: We are planning to travel across Europe for in-house trainings and working together with other partners in the UK, Switzerland, Germany and Poland to organize classroom-based trainings.

Besides this, we will focus on consultancy, code reviews, mentoring. We'll continue on the path that we have choosen a few years ago: Helping developers find the right tools and knowledge to build awesome Magento shops.