Frustrated by Magento? Then you’ll love
Back when I still had some hope Magento 2 would be the same sort of open-source-for-everyone platform that Magento 1 was, and I was working my way through writing the Magento 2 for PHP MVC Developers series, I was simultaneously developing pestle, my command line tool for generating Magento 2 modules.
As time went on I realized the Magento specific commands were buried in pestle’s UI, so I started breaking them out into their own namespace
# old command name format
pestle.phar command-name
# new command name format
magento2:command-name
magento2:generate:command-name
Unfortunately, these command names didn’t match my original articles, and the thought of digging through the archives to find every reference and change it didn’t really appeal to me — particularly as it became clearer that Magento 2 was chasing a more corporate controlled and “enterprise” version of open source.
That left pestle’s documentation in an odd state. Everything was out there, and smart developers could pick it up — but newcomers would either need to wade through my entire blog series OR start guessing based on commands in Pestle’s help. As much as as I disliked the direction post-eBay/pre-Adobe Magento chose to take their platform, I still had empathy for that developer just starting out with that platform, and that empathy gnawed at me.
So I’m finally doing something about it. I recently created a new milestone in the pestle project that, when complete, will fully document the Magento side of pestle (as well as some of the more esoteric features of the framework itself). I’m also putting aside my usual side-eye for publishing to servers I don’t control, and making everything work with the popular Read the Docs service.
It’s a daunting amount of work and far from my first priority, but I’m hoping to chip away at it over the summer. If you’ve got a favorite command or weird bit of esoteric behavior you’d like to document, PRs are welcome.