The work in progress with Magewire 3

Magewire 3 is upcoming

Magewire is gaining traction: Any Magento backend developer, who has not touched upon it yet, is definitely missing out big time. While the inner crowd is not huge yet, it became time for a huge refactoring: Livewire 3 came out months ago and Magewire promised to support it. And with that, the creator of Magewire - Willem Poortman (aka "Portman") - was looking for an adaptation of the changed code of Livewire 3 into Magewire 3. With that, Magewire is missing a step - version 2 will never exist.

Besides cool stuff, like making it easy to add new features to Magewire yourself and using Magewire in the Magento Admin Panel, the strategy behind the Magewire project (being a port of Laravel Livewire into Magento) changed a bit: Instead of duplicating logic, a lot of the original PHP code in Livewire is simply reused. In various places, this requires still modification, which is done with class overrides and different PHP namespaces. But because of this, it will become easier to maintain Magewire and keep it in sync with Livewire.

A summary of the hackathon on April 17th

On April 17th, we sat down with a group of 14 people, to work on this new release. At least, this was the idea: The sources for Magewire 3 were still very much in development. We all suffered issues when trying to install it. But from this, a discussion was setup on how to organize all of the various packages from within a single monorepo and how to name the PHP namespaces.

After this, other work was picked up like porting the Livewire Features and Mechanisms towards Magewire. I personally tried to improve the original layout component resolver from Magewire 1 (leading into weird layout issues and even ugly XML parsing code), ending up with the conclusion that the original code was still the best as of yet.

However, after this hackathon, tons of work still remain. Because of this, Willem called up on us to help along to push towards the release of Magewire 3.

Todays call

Today Willem called for help once again. And Pascal Sopacua and Michiel Gerritsen and I were able to respond to it (others were occupied). A final decision on the PHP namespaces was made. And it was decided to try to work on developer documentation quickly from this moment onwards:

It should be clear to anyone trying to contribute how to pick up on specific work (ranging from setting up Laravel for comparison, via how to setup the Magewire dev sources, towards how to add a Feature class). And the remaining work should be outlined via GitHub Issues. This is coming up.

Next hackathon: Wednesday, May 29th

And we are organizing yet another hackathon, focused purely on the release of Magewire 3, aka making sure that Magewire 3 is complete enough to be released in a beta-form. The hackathon will take place on Wednesday, May 29th, but more details will be announced soon.

And we are already thinking about yet another Magewire hackathon after that, around the summer, this time also in an online format.

Learn more?

Months ago, I finished off a video training of more than 10 hours focused upon the Hyvä Checkout and almost half of it focuses upon Magewire. Want to dive into Magewire? The project is free, the documentation is free, but if you are looking for a video course with a wealth of details, I've got your back.