Last week was the first ever Hyvä Themes developer camp. Our founder, Ryan Copeland attended the event in Aachen, Germany. The event took place over 2 days and had members of the Hyvä Themes community attend from all over Europe.
The event included a number of technical sessions based on Hyvä Themes and some of its up and coming features. There were also a number of key topic discussion groups including “The future of Magento 2 Open Source”.
Overall the event was a huge success thanks to the amazing Hyvä Themes and integer.net teams. Their hospitality was fantastic and it was great to see big parts of the Magento community back together again after the pandemic.
For those who couldn’t attend, we’ve summarised the top 5 takeaways from the event in this article.
1. Adoption of Hyvä Themes has already overtaken PWA Studio
To open the Hyvä Themes camp, it’s inventor Willem Wigman, showed us a presentation demonstrating the uptake of Hyvä Themes when compared to PWA Studio. A key point in this presentation was that Hyvä Themes has already overtaken PWA Studio in terms of the number of stores launched despite only being available for the past 2 years.
2. 3rd party extension support is on its way
One major concern that merchants we speak to have with Hyvä Themes is extension compatibility. The framework simplifies frontend Magento 2 development by stripping away a lot of the bad stuff and replacing it with modern tools to assist developers in building super fast storefronts. This means that a lot of 3rd party extensions need to be made compatible. Currently the cost of doing this falls to the merchant if a compatibility extension is not already available.
At the camp it was confirmed that Amasty, Aheadworks, Mirasvit and Mageworx are currently in the process of making all of their most popular extensions compatible with Hyvä Themes. This means that when you purchase one of these extensions it will already be compatible with the Hyvä Themes framework.
We strongly believe that now these leading extension providers have announced support for Hyvä Themes all other extension providers will follow suit in the very near future. If they don’t then they will likely get left behind.
3. Magewire is coming to a checkout page near you
Magewire is an open source toolkit that you can install into your Magento 2 application to build highly complex features and functionality with ease. It was created by a Dutch Magento 2 developer called Willem Poortman. Magewire is being used to create a new Magento 2 checkout page that will enable Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce merchants to provide unique checkout experiences to their customers within realistic budgets. Such a thing is not currently possible with the LUMA checkout without investing large sums of both time and money.
The Magewire checkout is not currently available yet but we believe that we should see the product launch towards the end of 2022. The Hyvä Themes team have not yet confirmed this though. When it drops it’s going to be a game changer and we cannot wait to start using it to deliver unique checkout experiences to our clients customers.
4. New Hyvä Themes features close to launch
The Hyvä Themes team are currently working on a number of new features that they will add to the core product in the coming months. These include a library of UI components that developers can use to build their frontends with, more widgets to allow admins users to add content to their websites as well as number of other improvements to the core platform that will aim to speed up development further and reduce the time to market.
5. The future of Magento Open Source
After attending the event it is pretty clear that the Magento community is really rallying behind the Hyvä Themes product. As an agency we’ve never been more confident that Magento Open Source is here to stay. With the innovation going on in the Hyvä Themes camp the platform is only going to get stronger. It’s a super exciting time to be a Magento 2 merchant.
Closing Comments
After attending the camp our founder Ryan Copeland was extremely excited about the future of Magento 2 Open Source. He had this to say on the subject;
“It’s pretty clear that the Magento community is rallying behind the Hyvä Themes product. It’s going from strength to strength and is only going to get better with time. With Willem and Vinai at the helm of this product the sky really is the limit.
The uptake in the platform when compared to its counterparts is super impressive but it’s not just the product that excites me here. There is a real community feeling back in the room with developers from all over the world helping each other solve problems and develop new features.
With a community working in such a way and a product like Hyvä Themes the main beneficiary of this scenario is the merchants. I am super excited to see where this is going to go and what great solutions we can develop in the future for our clients.”
Want to know more about Hyvä Themes?
Foundation Commerce have quickly become a leading UK Hyvä Themes agency. We were one of the 1st agencies in the UK to launch a Hyvä Themes Magento 2 project and have adopted it as our preferred solution for our projects.
Reach out today to find out how Hyvä Themes can supercharge your Magento 2 websites performance whilst lowering your total cost of ownership and time to market.