Magento Forums Hit 100K Members
Magento celebrated a special milestone earlier this month, hitting 100k users on its community website and support forums. The Magento ecommerce platform is available in two forms – the free and open source community edition, and the premium enterprise edition. The free version depends upon the community for support, so it’s a big deal to see it become so popular and have so many people willing to share their time and experience.
The Magento Forums are an important resource for both users and developers, and they are a vital part of the experience for thousands of ecommerce site owners who rely upon Magento to power their online stores.
As a part of the announcement, the Magento developers provided some interesting stats. The community has given out more than 1,500 ‘kudos’ to users who have shared information and provided a helping hand, and there have been more than 1,000 solutions accepted to community questions about topics ranging from installation to customisation. The community, collectively, is what makes Magento so valuable as an ecommerce platform.
The Magento platform has come a long way since it was first released. It spent a while under the leadership of eBay, and last year was separated and became its own company. Now that it is free to choose its own direction, it is progressing rapidly as a platform. The developers have created their own separate marketplace for third party theme designers and extension makers to share their work. This helps to standardise the way in which extensions and themes are distributed, which is very important for reducing the threat from malicious code and viruses.
Magento has experienced a few bumps in the road since it became its own company. There have been some issues with cross-site scripting bugs, including one bug which was discovered over a year ago, but which has been left unpatched on thousands of community edition websites. Malicious coders have started contacting the owners of those websites, and tricking them using social engineering into installing an infected patch for that bug, which gives them privileged access to the shop’s admin panel.
While Magento itself has been beyond reproach as to how it has handled the bug, the severity of it, and the number of websites still affected, is enough to cause serious concern and has been rather bad press for the company, because the flaw puts customer data at risk of exposure.
This is where companies like Radweb or one of the many developers available in the community forums step in to patch, improve and develop Magento websites for customers of all sizes and industries.