With vast experience on the development side, Viktor Khliupko is one of the most respected guys in the Magento community. Viktor is a Certified Magento Developer, consultant and ecommerce enthusiast. He is currently working as the CEO of Firebear Studio, a project he has been involved with from last 2+ years now.
In this interview Viktor talks about the features of Magento and what to expect in Magento 2. Viktor said “I believe that Magento 2 will be released later this year. This is will be the next major step for the whole Magento ecosystem and community with lots of benefits and challenges.”
Viktor also shares his views about Magento certification for a newcomer and talks about the improvements on the Merchant end with respect to Magento 2. Read on to gain wisdom from his experiences.
Cloudways: Viktor, you’ve been involved with Magento & ecommerce for a quite long period of time. You have handled many Magento stores. What challenges did you face initially? How did your career start?
Viktor: I started my career as a web developer during the second year in the university in Donetsk, Ukraine back in 2010. I worked as a PHP developer in various agencies and at the same time started learning Magento. Then, I discovered Odesk (renamed into UpWork) and got my first projects from within the platform. All these led to
Cloudways: Currently you work as the CEO of Fire Bear Studio (A great resource for learning Magento) What is the reason behind starting Fire Bear Studio? Share some interesting memories from the nascent period of Fire Bear with our readers :).
Viktor: Initially, FireBear was a Magento full circle development company with its own extensions which I started together with my friend and teammate Andrey Nikolaev. Now we are totally focused on Magento 2 extension development and Magento consulting, helping various startups to improve their ecommerce business. During the last year, a lot of technical writers, developers and creative persons have joined us. You can see the full team here. Together, we’ve publised our first book about running a Magento store on the basis of Community Edition with all Enterprise-level features – magentodiy. The book was well accepted by the Magento community.
Cloudways: Viktor, you are Magento certified developer. What are the advantages of being a certified Magento developer? Share you thoughts for newbies who want certification in Magento?
Viktor: Certification is crucial for every senior Magento developer, since it is not only a good way to structure your knowledge, but is a perfect chance to expand them. Now, it’s time to start preparations for the Magento 2 certification which should be announced shortly after the release of Magento 2. I recommend everyone to join the official Magento 2 Fundamentals course – http://magento.com/training/catalog/fundamentals-of-magento-2-development – since it is the best place to get all the necessary information about the platform.
Cloudways: Magento is a very popular ecommerce platform. How do you foresee the future of Magento, especially after release of Magento 2? What do you think about Magento 2 and when it will be available?
Viktor: I believe that Magento 2 will be released later this year. This is will be the next major step for the whole Magento ecosystem and community with lots of benefits and challenges. Magento 2 will be for sure the hottest ecommerce open source system in the upcoming years and now it’s the best possible time for everyone to dive into it – developing extensions, exploring the core and documentation, taking official learning courses and trainings.
Cloudways: Fire Bear Studio has written a lot of blog posts on Magento 2. What do you think how Magento 2 impact on ecommerce industry? In your opinion how merchant can improve their store with Magento 2?
Viktor: Magento 2 will be the number one platform in coming years. Together with some interesting competitors like OroCommerce, Prestashop, and WooCommerce, it will introduce new opportunities related to B2B, mobile commerce, social shopping, and marketplace platforms.
As for the migration to Magento 2 from Magento 1.x, it won’t be a good idea before summer 2016. I hope that this time will be enough for the platform to become stable and production proven. Together with various agencies, the ecosystem will be mature enough to replace Magento 1.
Cloudways: In your opinion, what are the advantages of attending Meet Magento conference for rookies who want to involve themselves more and more in Magento Community?
Viktor: Attending Magento community events like Meet Magento is always good idea for both merchants and developers. It doesn’t matter if you have huge experience with Magento or just want to start your first efforts – everyone will get precious experience from communicating with the Magento team and leading agencies from all over the world. Meet Magento offers a great chance to become acquainted with the community and know the most interesting stuff around it.
Cloudways: You attended Magento Hackathon Switzerland. Share with our readers some of your great moments.
Viktor: This was my first Meet Magento and it was impressive with all the great speakers and a lot of new connections, information, and ideas. I spoke with Ben Marks, our rock-star Magento evangelist, about the new Magento Connect and new requirements for Magento 2 extensions. It was also great to meet Magento developers from Ukraine who currently work in Zurich.
Cloudways: Viktor, let’s talk about the future of Magento 🙂 What are your expectations of Magento 2? Magento 2 beta is now in the market. How do you see Magento in the next 5 years?
Viktor: We’ve already started the development of some innovative interesting Magento 2 extensions for the new Magento Connect which should be released along with Magento 2, so our expectation are very high. 🙂 M2 introduces some modern features and developing principles which we were waiting for in Magento 1.x. For instance, advanced frontend and backend technology stack and Test Driven Development principles for extensions. It’s hard to say what will happen in 5 years, but I am sure Magento 2 will grow in B2B and marketplace directions.
Cloudways: What features would you like to see in Magento 2? With the release of Magento 2.0 in beta, there is a lot of debate going on about the compatibility of web shops with the new version. What would be your recommendations for those e-merchants looking to upgrade from 1.x to the new version?
Viktor: Since Magento 2 is a true open source project, we, as community members, have a direct contact with core developers, so everyone can contribute changes. Therefore, we already have almost all features we wanted to have in M2, but everyone is still welcome with suggestions. As I said above, in case of merchants, it makes sense to wait until Magento 2 become as strong as Magento 1.x is now – with all mature extensions and partners ecosystem.
Cloudways: Magento uses modules and extensions. Name 5 of your extensions that you can’t live without while developing your Magento website.
Viktor:
- Fooman Speedster Advanced – https://github.com/fooman/speedsteradvanced – a must have tool for CSS/JS minification and caching
- n98Magerun – https://github.com/netz98/n98-magerun Absolutely must have CLI tool for Magento which saves hours or work
- Lesti FPC – a great free open source cache which allows you speed up Magento significantly in a quick and easy way
- Redis cache – https://github.com/colinmollenhour/Cm_Cache_Backend_Redis – Make your caches faster in Redis!
- And the last one which seems to be extremely popular is a new tool developed at Meet Magento CH – https://github.com/EcomDev/EcomDev_LayoutCompiler. It is an innovative extension for performance improvements which provides the ability to speed up dynamic Magento part where the Full page cache is not working. The tool is free, open source, and covered with all possible tests. Its author is Ivan Chepurnyi – a community star and a former Magento core developer.
Cloudways: The websites powered by Magento are vulnerable to some serious security threats. These include, but are not limited to, credit card misuse, information theft, content duplication, etc. What steps should be taken to thwart these security threats?
Viktor: During the previous several months the whole Magento community really got a lot of “fun” with security patches. The first and most simple rule which will help you prevent your ecommerce store from new threats requires updating to the recent Magento version and installing all security patches. I would also like to mention several official community driven resources and tools that have been developed to help you with keeping Magento healthy:
- Magento Security Center https://magento.com/security – the offical number one resource with information about all recent security patches and problems.
- MageReport https://www.magereport.com – a great tool for online on the fly security check of any Magento store.
- https://github.com/firegento/magento – a community driven repository of Magento 1.x versions with all available security patches.
- Magento Security Ultimate Guide – https://firebearstudio.com/blog/magento-security-ultimate-guide.html – our own up to date guide which covers all major Magento security aspects.
Cloudways: Let’s put Magento aside and talk about your interests. Do you like traveling? How do you spend time besides work?
Viktor: I travel a lot because Magento allows me to work remotely with my clients and projects, so I am very thankful for such an opportunity. 🙂 For the last several years I’ve visited about 20 different countries around the Europe and don’t want to stop – never stop to explore! Also, I enjoy experimental metal music, visit a lot of gigs, and even find friends in Magento Community who join me on concerts.
Cloudways: Everyone has some inspiration behind their success. Name some people from the Magento Community who have inspired you the most?
Viktor: Vinai Kopp, Ben Marks, and Alan Storm – These are my top 3 Magento evangelists.
Cloudways: Cloudways provides 1-click Magento installation with fabulous speed of your cloud server on our platform. I would highly appreciate if you can provide some suggestions or feedback about the platform. Don’t hesitate to share your opinions of Cloudways for Magento hosting!
Viktor: Prepare yourself for Magento 2 and you will be ready for lots of new requests – the game is changing with the most recent software available – PHP7, Composer, Node.JS, and a plethora of other technologies should be supported out of the box. Also, it would be good to have a full support for containers – Docker for instance.
Abdur Rahman
Abdur Rahman is the Magento whizz at Cloudways. He is growth ambitious, and aims to learn & share information about Ecommerce & Magento Development through practice and experimentation. He loves to travel and explore new ideas whenever he finds time. Get in touch with him at [email protected]
