Mageconf Contribution Day 2020 Recap

“Most likely we won’t need more than 10 minutes for the demo stage today.”
I know I speak on behalf of many in saying, I am inspired and I am appreciative. We are a strong and passionate group of Magento engineers and we once again proved the power of community.

At the end of the Contribution Day, we had 53 pull requests created. Most of the pull requests had P1 or P2 priority status, which means that these PRs contain very important changes. So in terms of quantity and quality, we must admit that the result is outstanding.
I just want to send kudos to all the contributors and especially all the people who helped to organize this great event. We genuinely hope to see you all soon sitting in one room and coding as in the older days. Stay safe!

  • Magento Core
  • PWA
  • GraphQL
  • PhpStorm Plugin
  • DevDocs.

Check out the video recap with the key parts of the event here.
Those were the words from a contributor who had to delegate Friday and Saturday for work this time.

This past Friday and Saturday we hosted a 24 hours Contribution Day before the annual MageCONF 2020 conference. The “remote” opportunity – to get back together to connect, to code, to communicate, to share — despite all the lockdowns around the world cannot be under-appreciated. Modern systems for communication allow us not only to create traditional webinars but to move entire conferences online including networking, partner roadmaps and peer-led sessions. In short, it was a terrific event.

We had a backlog prepared for every track, so contributors didn’t have to come up with interesting tasks to pick up, they were already in place. All the tracks were covered by a maintainer who helped contributors to solve their issues (we had 7 people from Adobe!).

Frankly speaking, we were waiting for more people. So, it was not very exciting to see around 25 people at the very beginning.

“I didn’t have a chance to join, but I saw your demos. They were cozy and warm as usual at such contribution days. You are awesome, guys.”
Speaking about the changes that were created during Contribution Day, it is worth mentioning at least some of them in details:
Traditionally, the MageCONF Contribution Day is one of the largest hackathons in the Magento world. Last year we had around 100 participants, physically, in one room. This year we hosted about the same number, but virtually. There were 5 dedicated tracks for different technologies, where every contributor had a chance to try her or himself:

  • PWA Studio: a target for payment methods added. The new target will allow extending payment methods functionality on the build level using Webpack [details].
  • PWA Studio: bug fixed when zip code has not been cleared after the country change on checkout [details].
  • GraphQL: added possibility to filter categories by parent ID [details].
  • GraphQL: fixed exposing special price when the current date is not in range. In this PR we have fixed the scenario when you may request a special price for a product when the special price is not enabled yet in terms of the date range [details].
  • PhpStorm Plugin: added index, completion and references for table names, column names. With this change, you will have an autocompletion for table names when working with declarative schema [details].
  • PhpStorm Plugin: email templates generation [details].
  • PhpStorm Plugin: a round of UI updates [details].
  • Magento Core: fixed mini-search issue on mobile resolutions with search suggestions disabled [details].
  • Magento Core: fixed escaping quotations for search synonyms [details].
  • Magento Core: handle exceptions thrown in child processes forked by ProcessManager. After this fix, you will be able to see the exact error messages (instead of the well-known Magento 2 internal server error in this case) of the child processes of the ProcessManager [details].

Do not just take my word for it, below I highlight all that went on. Beyond this recap, I recommend you dedicate downtime to review the various community-led contributions.
That’s what we were talking about right before the demo at 9:00 PM CEST. But then, suddenly, we had an amazing pack of presentations for the next hour and a half. So after the “radio silence” in chat, we got the blast of cool features and bugfixes from the contributors. We saw the same picture for the second round of the demo at 12:00PM CEST and had even a small presentation from Oleksandr Kravchuk.