Swiss Magento User Group Meet-Up #8 Recap

Although we’re not meeting regularly every month as in other cities, yesterday we had our 8th Swiss Magento User Group Meet-Up at Citizen Space in Zürich, also called Magento Stammtisch. As announced we had a special guest from Berlin, Fabian Blechschmidt, who’s currently freelancing for a Zürich based education provider. He’s a well known developer in the Magento community and a regular organizer of Magento Hackathons in Germany and Spain, as well as the PHP Unconference Europe which this year will take place in Palma de Mallorca.

It was nice to see some new faces like Ralph Lohse from Zürich and Demian Holderegger from Winterthur, the latter of which is a developer at Liip, a Zürich based Magento solution provider.

Ralph spontaneously came up with a question of how to automatically assign new customers from a particular email domain to a certain customer group. After quickly introducing Magicento, a PHPStorm plugin for Magento developers, Fabian wrote an observer in just a couple of minutes which just did what Ralph was anticipating.

class Stammtisch_AddToCustomerGroup_Model_Observer
{
    public function customerSaveBefore(Varien_Event_Observer $observer)
    {
        /* @var $customer Mage_Customer_Model_Customer */
        $customer = $observer->getCustomer();
        if (!$customer->getId() && strpos($customer->getEmail(), '@domain.ch')) {
            $customer->setGroupId(4);
        }
    }

Here’s the complete code in case you want to extend or play with it.

Sylvain Rayé from Diglin, a Magento solution provider based in Schlieren, gave us a quick overview of Akeneo, a Symfony2 based open source product information management (PIM) system designed for retailers looking for efficient answers to their multichannel needs. The team behind Frédéric de Gombert, former e-commerce director at Smile, a French open source integrator who also has an office in Geneva, just announced their first release candicate of Akeneo 3 weeks ago. Akeneo can already export products to Magento, so it will be interesting to watch where this project is headed.

In the end I was quickly presenting Operation Frontend Steward to show how active the Magento community is in regard to Magento 2. Instead of always just complaining, some developers are taking the initiative and are really trying to make a difference and influence the future of Magento. This project was started as part of the first Magento Online Hackathon end of January 2014 and has been discussed vividly on Github during the last couple of weeks.

After our presentations we headed over to Steinfels restaurant for food and drinks.

It was another nice little Magento community event. Thanks to everyone for attending and sharing your knowledge. Hope to see you next time.