What has happened since?

The critics will say "Not much" but they will have something to bitch about whenever something great is about. But it has to be said: Magento has repeatedly mentioned that Magento 2 was upcoming, but the deadline for a first release was moved from 2011 to 2012 to 2013 to 2014. And when milestones are moved that much, people get disappointed.

But actually a lot has happened: Meanwhile, Yoav Kutner left the company (but made a comeback with OroCRM). eBay first funded the Magento project big time, and then took over Magento itself. Next, X.Commerce was announced as the next big thing after Magento. Many were afraid that X.Commerce would kill Magento, but since a series of great tutorials on how to implement the X.Commerce backbone referred as the Fabric, it seemed that no other parties were jumping. After a while, Magento itself came back (as eBay company) to announce that it would reshift its focus from X.Commerce to Magento 2. Magento 2 made its way to GitHub.

Magento 2 is showing a cool codebase already

As we see it, the Fabric of X.Commerce is currently at a stand-still, at least for the smaller open source developers like Yireo. But work on Magento 2 is moving - slowly but steadily. While non-developers will get pretty disappointed if they try to installl the current Magento 2, but programmers should get enthousiastic: Various cutting edge technologies and design patterns are currently being  implemented in Magento, cleaning up the current code-base drastically but also opening up for various exciting possibilities. The code can already be seen on GitHub. And regardless of whether you believe Magento 2 is a hoax or not, the current code inspires: Dependancy injection, object management, etcetera.

Crossfingers, May 2014?

Browsing the web gives little insight into the actual plans for Magento 2, but somewhere we found a spreadsheet with various milestones. It mentioned milestone 4 is important, and it shows Magento will alpha-ready when milestone 5 is reached. It does not say what the milestones mean - yes, things get very mystical here, we like that - but it does mention that end of May 2014 most important milestones would be completed. It could be indicating that Magento 2 reaches an alpha early June.

Consider the paragraph pointless or not, the main reason why I added it anyway is to show that Magento 2 is moving. And there are signs that the deadlines for Magento 2 will definitely not move to 2015, which again shows that we need to get ready for Magento 2. The sources for Magento 2 are on GitHub. For sure, I know what I will be doing this weekend.