A new Magento standard

Another blog? What's the point?

In the past, I have already written many blogs on Hyvä, Magewire and so. And I don't want to repeat myself. Hyvä is great, Magewire is great, life is great, yada yada. However, there is one single point I want to make here:

Ever since Hyvä has been on the rise, the question has been whether it would become the standard or not. I personally think that this point has been reached by now: It is not a specific point actually, it is not set in stone. In some parts of the world (like The Netherlands), most agencies use Hyvä for new shops. In yet other parts of the world, other solutions are more popular. The Hyvä Checkout has been out for a limited amount of time, but it is gaining popularity very quickly. There are other checkout options out there as well. Perhaps in some cases, Luma is not that bad. And Magewire still feels early in adoption, but it has o-so-much potential.

Put differently, if you look at the current state of things, Hyvä is leading Magento at this moment.

What about Luma, Adobe PWA Studio, Breeze and others?

I mentioned this earlier already: Some people are fine with Luma. Likewise, I do know various agencies who specialize in Adobe PWA Studio and make it work. And Breeze is proving to help optimize Luma shops. And DEITY is still there, as well as Alokai (Vue Storefront). While organizing the Reacticon conferences years ago, my main message was that it is a good healthy thing to see so many frontends: Each one has its own reason to live. And if no-one likes it, it simply just fades away.

My impression (no stats, blame me for it) is that of all the new shops currently being built, more and more are built with Hyvä. This, while Luma is a good second. And next all of the other providers have a share.

And even a Hyvä Developer Paradise

Funnily enough, this is also being reflected by the announcement that next year - 2025 - there will be a Hyvä Developer Paradise. Not a Magento Developer Paradise, but a Hyvä Developer Paradise. That's where the enthousiasm goes.

Frontend vs backend development

That being said, I personally see Hyvä as very active on the frontend. Hyvä Themes and Hyvä UI are products focused on the frontend. Some parts of that technology (Magewire, ViewModels) touches upon backend development as well. And the Hyvä Checkout is more something for backenders then frontenders. Still, Hyvä is very popular as a brand because of its enlightening effect on frontending.

There are other movements as well: Mage-OS is pushing Magento forward as well, with things much more related to backend development. So, the new standard that I'm talking about in this blog, is covering mostly Hyvä on the frontend part, while I personally think the standard on the backend development part still needs to be sorted out.

Downsides of Hyvä, Magewire and this new standard

Whenever there is a new standard, people jump on it and start promoting it (that's kind of the meaning of hype). And whenever more attention goes to the positive parts than to the negative parts, I'm kind of eager to expose the negative parts as well. And there are downsides of Hyvä and Magewire and this new standard:

For many, the amount of PHTML template overrides in a Hyvä project is staggering, often while in a template of 1000 lines of code just 1 line needs to be changed (TailwindCSS classes, for instances). The Tailwind configuration has its issues. The Hyvä Checkout was said to be easy and it is, unless you dive really deep into it - under the hood, the code is sometimes a bit messy. CSP is currently not adopted yet by Hyvä. And all of the major rewrites that would fix things and move things forwards, are held back as to not break backward compatibility. This sounds like a rant, it perhaps is and let me write more about these downsides in upcoming blogs :)

Back to the celebration

I don't want to bash things in this blog - I'll do that in later blogs. So as of yet, I wanted to point out that I believe in Hyvä, Magewire, Mage-OS and everything. And I do believe that they are part of a new Magento standard. Anyone who is busy with Magento should be aware of these standards and should find it easy to work with them as well.