4th Magento Hackathon Recap

Last weekend I had the chance to participate in the 4th Magento Hackathon which was held in Munich, just as the one before.

If you are not familiar with the idea, a hackathon is an event where developers lock themselves up into a space where they will not be disturbed by customers, girlfriends, colleagues or dogs dying to mark all trees in their radius. The purpose of this bacchanalia of zeroes and ones in most cases is building a project(s) no one wants to pay for. That’s how Magento Hackathon started a couple of years ago. Since then the community of Magento-geeks grew a lot, some very nice sponsors came up to support the event and now Magento Hackathons are happening on a more or less regular basis.

Everything started with beer, schnaps and some good party on Friday. The location was quite nice. Not so noisy as last time and also the sitting position is much more familiar for a developer than standing. So this time everything went nice and smooth and everyone seemed to enjoy the party. I saw almost nobody stumbling against the screen of their mobile device for hours. The tone was set so once the party was over we moved into the hotel bar and continued there until we were gently asked to leave. And for good reason as there were less then 6 hours left for sleep before real action started.

Surprisingly, next morning I felt fresh and ready for a kick-off. The hackathon started with my speaking session about estimating Magento upgrades. Here you can find the slides› PDF, although I’m planning to write a full article covering this subject. After that everyone turned to the whiteboard to check what project ideas we have gotten in the tank and there was a bunch of. Each idea was explained by the author and small voting begun. As a result 4 top projects were selected for execution after which all guys divided into 4 teams. Luckily, one of my ideas was among those selected so I joined the group who found it worthy, even though I was also interested in another project so I had to make a hard decision.

Below are all 4 projects with some short descriptions and links to their github repositories:

Magento Social Commerce Module

This extension allows to automate tweets about new products or categories in the store and also tweet about new orders. Facebook and Delicious integrations are also planned. In addition bit.ly URL shortener is integrated.

Change Magento Products Sort Order By Drag’n’Drop

Changing products sort order in Magento can be painful. First all products are added to category with default sorting order equals to zero so changing order will mean setting sort order for each. Then if you defined back-to-back sorting numbers for your products and then you want to squeeze a new product in you will have to shift sort order of the rest. These two situation will be just a small inconvenience if you have relatively small amount of products in your category but imagine how much trouble it will be in case you have hundreds. This extension is aimed to resolve this issue in most elegant way. The sorting in both frontend (so far only list mode) and backend can be as simple as dragging and dropping products over each other and the extension is doing the rest.

Magento Composer

To my opinion this is the most interesting and maybe even a revolutionary project executed. The composer is in the air for a while and I’m wondering why it reached Magento only now. The idea is quite simple, install extensions from github (and maybe possibly in future from MagentoConnect) with just one command. That’s it. Easy as that. And it is already working and can be used. More and more extensions are added daily so maybe soon it will put the end to «MagentoConnect –> Github» talks which are so popular in Magento community during the last couple of months.

HoneySpam

This extension prevents spam dring Magento registration and review processes by adding a honeypot input field hidden by JavaScript. Then it checks if this hidden field was submitted and how fast. In the case the spammer was caught, an error message appears and form execution halts.

Magento Login Provider Framework

Yes, this is actually the 5th project. The thing is one of the teams finished their project quite fast so they decided to pick another idea from the box and make another extension. As far as I know this extension is still in development process. The idea is to provide alternative login methods for administrator interface.

The second day was spiced with a presentation by Fabian Blechschmidt who examined the list of top 10 vulnerabilities of modern web applications complied by OWASP and tested them all against latest version of Magento. It resulted in a quite interesting analysis and proved us once again that Magento is a highly secured platform and is keeping track on all recent methods of attacking web software.

The hackathon ended with projects presentation by each team and hopes for the next meeting.

I would like to thank all sponsors of 4th Magento Hackathon. Many thanks goes to Jarlssen for providing a splendid location for a second time in a row; Anolo for providing some awesome snacks; Shirtinator for some nice t-shirts which are still making man look like a man, which is quite a rear these days; SysEleven, Narf Studios, flagbit and icyApp for catering and friday party. Special thanks to Karl Spies for providing almost unlimited Club Mate supplies.