Author Archives: alankent
M2 Project Source Code Management Recommendation
In this post I describe the proposed Magento 2 recommendation for managing the source code of a Magento 2 project. Proposed, because this is my unofficial blog; recommendation, because there is no requirement to follow this approach. But I have some more blogs coming shortly that assume this approach. tl;dr: We ship a ‘.gitignore’ file […]
Vagrant Box for M2 Development (Quick Note)
I sometimes get asked “so what do the internal Magento developers use when developing?” We do not mandate a particular approach, but there is an unofficial Vagrant box that a number of the internal developers use now. Alex made it public, but it might not be well known: https://github.com/paliarush/magento2-vagrant-for-developers “Hey, Alan! I though you were a Docker […]
Creating a Kindle Book using Microsoft Word (Quick Note)
Amazon provides a tool called “kindlegen” for creating a Kindle book from a Microsoft Word document. There is also a previewer so you can test your book before publishing. In a nutshell, you keep your Word styles relatively simple, save as “Web Page, Filtered” (this strips out more of the Microsoft specific markup), and run kindlegen […]
Magento 2 Project Directory Structure Thoughts (Quick Note)
There have been a number of questions about “what is the best way to set up source code management for a Magento 2 project”. We try to keep things open, so people can do what makes most sense for their own project, but here is what I have been doing recently for my personal “play” […]
Windows + Docker + LiveReload + Gulp + Magento 2 (Quick Note)
I am writing this down before I forget! In a previous post I got Gulp working inside a Docker container with Magento 2. But I left out the minor detail that I was still struggling to get the Chrome LiveReload extension working. Reading all the reviews, half said “works fantastic” and other half said “does […]
Noodlings on Docker for Development in Magento 2 (Quick Note)
If you follow my blog, you will have seen I was doing some recent exploration of Gulp. You may also know I am quite interested in Docker. So it was interesting to try them out together. For Docker, you can have files located in the container. But I frequently blow the container away and start […]
Magento 2 Marketplace Upload Validation Tool (Quick Note)
Magento Marketplace is going through beta testing before opening up more widely. One area that has become clear is the need for a tool to help with verifying the packaging of extensions before submission. This blog post is a preview into this tool so extension developers can try it out today and provide feedback. In doing […]
Gulp et al in Magento 2
This blog describes a proposal of how you can use Gulp with Magento 2 today. It requires extension developers to do CSS in a particular way which is not currently recommended/documented. Feedback welcome to help determine if the approach is appropriate to turn into official policy. The Scope There are bigger questions – why use Less […]
CSS and Tooling in Magento 2 (Quick Note)
This post is a collection of thoughts and ideas around CSS development in Magento 2. It is triggered by several background activities: Magento 2 has Grunt support, but we get a lot of feedback that they would like Gulp support. For example, https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/2104. I am (in my spare time) currently writing a book on CSS […]
Microservices and Magento (Quick Note)
Firebear Studio published an interesting blog on Magento and Microservices. You might like to go read it first at Microservices In eCommerce And Magento | FireBear Blog. I thought I would give a quick possible way forward for Magento to see what others think. (There is no commitment to do any of this at this […]
Alan Kent's Blog 