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Day 1 Recap of Magento Live UK 2017

With Day 2 about to begin, let's quickly review the events of Day 1 at Magento Live UK. With over 940 in attendance, there are many people here that are eager to ride the wave of Magento 2 wave and found out what's next for their businesses. I'm glad to be able to attend to be a part of it, as well as meeting friends, old and new.

Gary Specter started us off sharing the growth of the platform. What was most impressive was the sheer size of the Magento economy and it's only expected to grow.

A lot of praise was given to the UK community but specifically to the top contributors for all they do to promote and support the community. Kudos goes to them!

The biggest announcement of the morning was Magento collaborating with Google on adding Progressive Web App support into the Magento core. This is something that we've been talking about and doing a lot of R&D on, so in the mean time you can watch this space. It's great to see them recognising it as the direction that the web is going in early.

In terms of what this announcement means, it's hard to say. It's very early days. From what we understand, the project is just about to begin and will be open source.

A smaller announcement was the renaming of Magento Community to Magento Open-Source to "better reflect" the commitment to open source. (As opposed to the commitment to community 😉). Magento Enterprise edition becomes Magento Commerce. We'll see how this goes, there's a lot of years tradition behind this one.

Wrapping up the first day's general session, the Trail Blazer awards were given for individuals within merchants that have climbed metaphorical mountains to bring their companies to the cutting edge of digital. This year's saw them go to people within Kurt Geiger, Olver Sweeney and MacFarlane Packaging.

Moving on to some of the breakout sessions, we had Brent Peterson give an introduction to the process of migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2.

Riccardo Tempesta shared his experience going headless with Magento for one of the largest furniture stores in Italy. With the amount of custom work to do to go headless, it's certainly not for the fainthearted but can be a solution to truly break the Magento mould and provide unique, engaging customer experiences.

Rob Moore presented an introduction to Magento Business Intelligence. This is definitely something to pay attention to and you don't have to be on Magento Enterprise Commerce to make use of it. The Essentials plan is available for $100/month and will take you beyond Google Analytics to provide better insights.

Looking longer term, Magento shared some information about their roadmap. While nothing in regards to timings, it does provide indication of what the priorities are at Magento. We can see confirmation of BlueFoot integrated into the Enterprise product for 2.3 along with Klarna and some under the hood changes. Rumours are that there is an aim to launch 2.3 before the end of the year.

Beyond 2.3 there are some big projects on the horizon. While PWA had been mentioned earlier, this also suggests a change of frontend libraries which would be a big change for Magento and the community. Then, as we experienced with releases of Magento 1 in the early days, we'll see more comprehensive API but in addition GraphQL support is listed.

As with any Magento event, we then went on to party network!

And with that, let's head on to day two!