Magento

Magento Community Update

A year ago, I joined Magento as an employee and what an amazing experience it has been. We’ve kicked off several initiatives; I have met some of the best and most amazing people in the Magento community including our forum volunteers, international community leaders, partners, merchants, developers, and enthusiasts.

The first thing I noticed when I came on board is what a great, vibrant and active community Magento has. I was very impressed with the many folks giving their free time as volunteers moderating forums, answering questions, working on language translations, holding Meetup events and more. One of my first initiatives was to meet, connect with and start recognizing some of these those folks. We created forum badges for moderators – and for high contributing members. Getting to know these folks has been one of the high points at Magento.  I have learned so much from you all.

Here’s a quick look back of some our community changes over this last year:

We’ve Improved Communications

First and foremost, we’ve improved our communications with you. We’ve gotten more social. We have several channels where you can communicate with us such as Magento forums, Facebook, LinkedIn, or one of our official twitter accounts. We have more Magento employees listening on twitter and more folks taking an active part in our social media. You can literally contact me anytime. These things make it possible for us to keep you better informed and connected and to get faster responses to your questions.

Community Support

We continue to strive for better ways to help you get answers, quicker.  We have some of the best folks who spend dedicated time in our forums helping to answer a wide range of technical questions and always on the lookout for major issues that may need to be addressed by our core team.  We’ve launched Magento Answers and are making better use of social media tools to connect us all together – including @Ask_Magento on twitter, for those questions and answers that can be supported in 140 characters or less.  Let’s not forget how Magento’s Expert Consulting Group took our community by storm - helping with really challenging questions and giving fantastic answers.

Magento Connect

A year ago, there were some challenges with Magento Connect.  Today, I can say that we’re really happy with the progress.  We’ve created Extension Guidelines and a Magento Connect FAQ which addresses the majority of packaging, installing and uploading issues. We are working directly with you to make sure that your issues get resolved and so that you can add your extension to Magento’s Marketplace.  We’re making improvements to Magento Connect based on your feedback. Did I mention that we have over 4500 extensions listed?

Magento Contributors Program

We’ve kicked our Magento Contributors program into high gear. We have nearly 100 contributors who’ve signed our MCA. We have several fixes and contributions coming directly from our community in our latest 1.6 release. We’ll be recognizing some of those contributors soon, stay tuned for that announcement. Additionally, we’re working on refining this process to keep you better informed of your contributions. Are you interested in contributing? and we’ll tell you how to get started.

We Are Listening to You

Finally, and most importantly—the audience is listening. The Magento audience is listening to you.

At our Magento’s Imagine eCommerce Worldwide Conference last February, not only did I have the opportunity to meet many folks in person but had many discussions with various community members about the direction of our community. I’ve been spending as much time as I can interacting with and also and learning about the community’s wants and needs directly from the source. We’ve made lots of changes based on that feedback.

It’s been a big year for Magento and this is only the beginning.  The one thing I’d like to truly express is that we couldn’t do this without you. Our community is one of the reasons that Magento is so great. We want to hear from you! And we’re listening. As always, you can anytime.  Here’s to many more happy years moving forward with our community. The best is yet to come!