The Future Of Magento Connect

As I mentioned in my previous post, several announcements were made during Mage::Camp about up and coming changes to Magento Connect; most noteworthy (from a developer’s standpoint) is the development of commercial licensing, encoding and payment handling.

Upon the release of Magento Connect 2.0 developers uploading their Magento extensions will benefit from the option of added security of optional encryption of source code. Due to the popularity and as yet impenetrable encryption, IonCube is almost certain to be the encoder of choice for commercial Magento Connect extensions. This new version will also include integrated licensing management and payment services, all of which will attract a small charge.

However, I feel the most significant development with Magento Connect 2.0, particularly from a community point of view, is the proposed new Quality Assurance (QA) system that will allow developers to have their extensions assessed and verified by a developer at Varien. This will provide users will a vital tool - helping them to distinguish the ‘gold’ from the ‘chaff’ and hopefully giving end users additional reassurance when purchasing commercial extensions.

Highlights From Mage::Camp

Big thanks to OnTap and Varien for a great show at Mage::Camp, just wanted to give readers an insight regarding some of the key things that were discussed with regards to the development of Magento in the coming year.

Magento API

A key area of interest for developers is that Roy Rubin made clear Varien’s commitment to expanding the scope of the Mage API to encompass all the functionality available through Magento Admin (no timeframe on that I’m afraid).

Magento Enterprise Edition

A number of questions were asked in relation to Magento Enterprise pricing. The main thing that I took away was basically a warning for EU developers - the pricing for us is a straight swap of the currency rather than based on the dollar price the current conversion rate, so that’s a starting at €8,900 per annum price.

However, there was some good news for customers hoping to use multiple servers for redundancy and load balancing, the ‘per instance’ licensing fee was “negotiable”. Meaning you’ll probably only have to pay for one license.

Magento Connect

Magento Connect 2.0 is coming, a major overhaul is already in the pipeline and many of the features, I believe, will only lead to a huge surge in commercial extensions and greater levels of trust between developers and end users. More on the proposed changes in a future post.