Magento Meet NYC 2023

This year I was lucky enough to attend the Meet Magento event in New York City. It’s an event dedicated to the open-source side of the Magento community and those who love the platform. We learned about the new developments in the ecosystem, a few popular vendors, and one or two success stories. We even had a chance to catch up with some old friends.

They held the event in the New World Stages, which is an off-Broadway theater venue a few blocks from Time Square. The venue had several stages, they dedicated one to technical discussions and another to Business. Every thirty minutes a new speaker would come up and give a presentation, and we were free to wander to whichever talk interested us most.

I’d say the headlining topic of the event was Mage-OS, the community fork of Adobe Commerce’s underlying open-source platform. Mage-OS launched “version 1” of their offering, based on Magento Open Source 2.4.6-p3, along with an event and used the opportunity to explain some of the driving principles and positioning of the project. Their goal is to support the small and medium-sized market and to provide an open ecosystem where vendors and customers can build businesses on license-free solid ground with compatibility and a migration plan to a more enterprise-centric solution down the line.

Another vendor that made a big splash was Hyva, who built a Magento Monolith Theme for growing imports. With Adobe Commerce backing off on Luma development, Hyva seems to be stepping in as the new player in that space. From our standpoint, we’re heavily invested in headless implementations, but for customers who aren’t, they made a persuasive case to consider their base theme package. They boast competitive lighthouse scores to Edge Delivery, and they tell me that by next year they will have full feature parity with Adobe Commerce. In a world where Luma is no longer in active development, this is poised to take the mantle for base consumer commerce experiences. It’s worth knowing about.

My favorite parts were the presentations that spoke to me and my work, and in a lot of those I found validation that we were on the right path. One that came to mind was a presentation surrounding Clorox and their headless journey. They told a tale that reminded me of our own struggles with finding a place for PWA Studio. They felt exactly how we did when they decided to not emphasize base frameworks and instead focus on building stellar components and blocks that can be made to interoperate with different frameworks.

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