What is New in Magento 2?

Magento 2 was first announced way back when, in 2010. Much has changed in IT since then. There wasn’t much noise from the Magento camp until October 2013; now there is a public repository with weekly updates. In this article we will take a look at Magento’s current technical status, compare it to the first version, and review the road ahead. –by David Manners and Tobias Zander

High-Performance Magento in the Cloud

Magento is a highly flexible and scalable eCommerce platform used by hundreds of thousands of merchants worldwide. The numerous features can easily be adapted and extended to one’s own business case. To operate a shop that can process more than one million visitors per day – up to 5,000 visitors concurrently and up to ten orders per second – requires some outside-of-the-box thinking. Traditional individual server setups are no longer viable, and each individual element of the infrastructure needs to be inspected for opportunities for optimization. –by Fabrizio Branca

The State of Symfony

Symfony, the full-stack framework for building PHP applications, is one of the most popular open-source projects in GitHub, but it is a lot more than just a framework, as you will see from this article. But first, let’s do a quick recap, as learning from the past prepares us for the future. –By Pablo Godel

Easy WordPress Dev Environments with Vagrant and Ansible

One of the evergreen hassles of Web development comes from the fact that the developer’s work is useless without a server to run it on. From this springs a thorny question: Where, exactly, should you be doing your work? On the same server that hosts your live site? On a separate staging or development server somewhere? On your local PC? –By Jason A. Lefkowitz

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The Confident Coder: Make the Reasons Overwhelming

From a very young age, we’re told to brush our teeth regularly. We know we should, but it can be a struggle to remember why. The reasons we are given to invest our important play time in such a mundane task aren’t always compelling. (If they were, why would some parents have to check to make sure the children had brushed their teeth before bed?)–by Aaron Saray

Education Station: Instagram Mashups the Easy Way in PHP

In this month’s column, I want to take you through Galen Grover’s excellent PHP-Instagram-API showing how to interact with the Instagram API and what it has in store. –by Matt Setter

Laravel Tips: Deploying Applications Part 1: Homestead

In today’s continuous integration and delivery environments, managing application deployments efficiently and consistently has become more important than ever. Since the development process starts with your development environment, we will take a look at Homestead, Laravel’s official Vagrant box. Choices we make when setting up our development environment will impact how well and how easily we are able to deploy our application to various other environments. –by Dirk Merkel

finally{}: On Conferences

It is my opinion that conferences are the essential backbone for people advancing their careers. I’m not saying that you can’t advance without being involved in conferences at all, but it’s amazing to me how many people I know have stories about how conferences raised them up. –by Eli White

Editorial: Embracing New Challenges

For many of us, it’s difficult to embrace new challenges without hesitation (or at least some misgivings). Whether it’s starting a new job and learning how a new codebase works, pitching a proposal for an ambitious new project, or even branching into a less technical endeavor like writing, change is scary.–by Oscar Merida