2012 is quickly rounding off and it’s been a great year for Magento, there’s no doubt about it. We feel like so much has happened and it is only the beginning of what is yet to come. Throughout the year, streams of companies have been joining the platform, whether it is to the community or the enterprise edition. As the turnouts to conferences such as Meet Magento, Magento LIVE and the Developer’s Paradise suggest, the industry is realizing its power within the eCommerce marketplace.
We think 2013 is going to be even bigger and better with Magento 2. Just take a look at all the things that we’ve got to be excited about:
2012: New Records, New Opportunities
Quarter 1 (January – March)
Events:
- Imagine worldwide conference held on April 23-35 in Las Vegas which sold out and earned 100% favorability ratings from attendees. 1,300 Magento merchants, developers and solutions partners have gathered from around the world. The conference started off with much anticipated developer’s BarCamp series of rapid-fire presentations on Magento and X.commerce, with all content drive by attendees.
Product Updates:
- Magento 1.6.2.0 released on Jan 11, 2012. Improvements in refactored indexing process. Magento Changed logic around reindexing to prevent conflicts between partial and full reindexing. Prevented situations where concurrent indexing processes run at the same time and overwrite each other’s data. Click here for more details.
- Magento 1.7.0.0-beta1 released on March 2, 2012. With the beat release Magento added support for using custom currency symbols, Improved customer address handling using PayPal Express checkout. Click here for more details.
- Magento 1.7.0.0-rc1 released on Mar 28, 2012. With this release the major highlights are – Implemented different base prices for customer groups, VAT ID Validation added, Implemented DHL for Europe, Added REST API. Click here for more details.
Quarter 2 (April -June)
Events:
- Meet Magento Germany took place the Sixth time in May 21st and 22nd in Leipzig. The whole place was buzzing with excitement as Meet Magento reached a new attendance record with over 550 attendees with merchants, developers, partners and community members.
- Magento U training at Las Vegas April 18th – 22nd has been a great success.
- The 7th Bargento event was the premier French eCommerce conference, happened on May 29th at CNIT in Paris. Drew in over 1,000 attendees and 43 sponsors for the one-day event. The room was filled and was buzzing with excitement as Ulric Jerome, the Executive Director of Pixmania, kicked off the event with the first keynote presentation.
- The fourth Meet Magento conference in The Netherlands took place on May 29-30, 2012 and was organized by the Dutch Magento community.
Product updates:
- Magento 1.7.0.0 released on Apr 24, 2012. The major improvement has done in the area of added the Cash On Delivery and Bank Transfer payment methods, Implemented the frontend Cookie Restriction functionality (EU cookie law compliance) and Improved customer address handling for PayPal Express checkout. Click here for more details.
- Magento 1.7.0.1 released on Jun 20, 2012. With this release Magento improved the backend configuration UI for PayPal payment solutions, added the ability to define dependencies between fields from different field sets. Click here for more details.
Quarter 3 (July -September)
Events:
- MageConf III: 2012, the Magento Development Team and the best of PHP and Magento developers from Russia, Ukraine, and other countries of CIS got together. The event took place on September 15, 2012 in Kiev, Ukraine.
- Developers Paradise held in Ibiza on September 24 to 27, 2012, over 120 developers, from over 20 countries, gathered in Ibiza for the third annual Developers Paradise, hosted by NetResearch.
Product updates:
- Released Magento Enterprise 1.12 and Community 1.7.0.2. The recent enhancements to the editions powerful eCommerce offerings help merchants provide a more personalized shopping experience for their customers.
- Magento 1.7.0.2 released on Jul 5, 2012. With this release two fixes done on the product. The Security vulnerability in Zend_XmlRpc-http://framework.zend.com/security/advisory/ZF2012-01 and PayPal Standard does not display on frontend during checkout with some merchant countries. Magento published a patch that addressed this issue.
- The 4 million download of the free, groundbreaking Magento Community Edition
- Surpassing the 5,000 extension milestone exceed on Magento Connect
- Introduced a robust set of new Magento Test Automation Framework
- Magento Go – additional features got introduced to meet UK merchant’s needs. Like – compliance with UK cookie law, royal main shipping, volume based pricing, VAT on shipping and entire order, improved PayPal experience including express check out etc.
Quarter 4 (October -December)
Events:
- MagentoLive UK November 13, day full of activities; while partner meetings were being held in the afternoon, Magento developers were busy taking their Developer Certification exams throughout the day. The day ended with a warm-up community welcome event sponsored by WebShopApps and ebizmarts at the stylish Abacus for a get-together over drinks. It was a great way to catch-up and meet new members from the Magento community.
- Meet Magento Brazil 2012 hosted by Netresearch in São Paulo. On November 8th, over 200 attendees came together both business and technology background and the event was opened by an energetic speech from Yoav Kutner, who did an overview of, “Magento: A Journey Down the Open Road,” Yoav gave an overview about the development of Magento from the beginning and spoke about the challenges of founding a business.
The exceptional dedication and support of the Magento community of 800,000+ members and over 400 Solution Partners and 100 Industry Partners worldwide, Magento is enjoying tremendous market momentum — adding over 100 new enterprise retailers a month and 1000s a month on Magento Community Edition and Go.
A recent comparison of the over 20 platforms found that “Magento continues its rise and dominance as the industry’s most popular platform” with a 31.4% share of the market across all versions of Magento. (Source: aheadWorks blog post, Sept. 11, 2012)
20% of all eCommerce Sites in the Alexa Top 1 Million Sites Use Magento – that’s more than any other eCommerce platform. (Source: Tom Robertshaw eCommerce Survey, February 21, 2012).
To date, more than 125,000 businesses worldwide have chosen Magento as their eCommerce platform. Magento customers range from trail-blazing start-ups and fast-growing eCommerce innovators to some of the largest and most respected global brands spanning a number of industries.
As we look forwards to 2013, we are confident that you’ll be excited about what’s coming down the line with Magento 2, Meet Magento Events, Developer Paradise and Magento U worldwide.
Stay tuned to our Blog for Magento eco system news and updates!
