How can we enforce better Magento extensions?

Jisse Reitsma

Jisse Reitsma

How can we enforce better Magento extensions?

The current ecosystem of Magento gives room for both bad and good extensions. Of course, if you are one of the cool kids, you are only high-quality extensions or even better, you only rely on your code. But in real-life, the success of Magento is there thanks to the 1000s of extensions that allow you to easily modify the Magento system. And often, these extensions do these things in dead-ugly ways, that make you work hard once you need to track issues or develop custom-code on top of it.

How to prevent this from happening? Not using any extension is not the answer. Only relying on trustworthy extensions is part of the answer, but how do you define what is trustworthy? This talk goes through a series of known checks on which to base extension quality (code quality, testing, yadayada) but it goes a step further: It discusses on how to enforce MFTF, how to guarantee certain dependency tracking, how to do code reviews, how to apply Marketplace checks on non-Marketplace code. It discusses this in the light of new changes (headless; Adobe; climate change). Part of it is to explain the efforts of Magento Marketplace and ExtDN. Part of it is a personal brainfart. Part of it is an open question on where to move with Magento next. This is meant as a feedback-driven talk to ask ourselves the question what we can do to help the ecosystem of extensions improve.

Jisse Reitsma

I’m the owner, developer and trainer of Yireo, providing numerous Magento extensions to the community, but also training frontend developers and backend developers throughout Europe. I was awarded a Magento Mastership for organizing usergroup meetings, hackathons and developer conferences like MageTestFest and Reacticon. I’m also part of ExtDN, the Magento extension developer network.