When’s the right time to move from Magento 1 to Magento 2?

Last week, Magento announced in a blog post that it would continue to support Magento 1 customers “for the foreseeable future” and it concluded by saying, “Lastly, we are committing to a minimum 18-month notice before we make any changes to our support levels.”

At first glance, this sounds great. Because up until now, Magento had indicated it would end support of Magento 1 in November 2018, as part of its effort to encourage Magento 1 customers to migrate their websites to Magento 2.

Why does this matter? Thousands of companies depend on Magento 1 as their commerce solution. Magento 2, although still experiencing bugs in its initial realeases, is in several keys ways a major improvement over Magento 1.

But moving to Magento 2 represents a major undertaking and expense that any business would want to postpone as long as possible.

So hearing that the M1 cutoff has been extended past November 2018 is good news, right?

The answer is, we don’t know. In reading the blog post more closely, several questions arise, first and foremost:

What is meant by “customers”? It’s reasonable to think customers could be limited to M1 Enterprise Edition users only. If so, what is the timeline for companies based on M1 Community Edition?

What are the date(s) we can expect security patches to end for M1 EE and M1 CE?

Are any changes planned to M1 licensing and fees?

At Vonnda, we are keenly focused on our clients long-term success. We help companies use technologies to advance their business goals, and to extract the best value possible for their investment.

For these reasons, we have committed to Magento 2 for all new development implementations. Magento 2 is the way forward and it provides the best roadmap for long-term success. As of this writing it is in version 2.x, which contains widely reported bugs.

Fortunately, Magento has committed to having these issued fixed with the 2.2 release. Unfortunately, Magento has not committed to a date for the 2.2 release.

In the interim, we advise our Magento clients as follows:

For M2 Clients:
Vonnda has developed fixes for M2 core issues, which allow our clients’ M2 sites to perform. As official Magento updates and patches are released we will roll back our fixes to be replaced by the official versions.

For M1 Clients:
Plan ahead to migrate to M2. M1 has been a strong solution, but its days are numbered.

• M1 CE clients should consider November 2018 to be the EOL date, until we hear official word from Magento to the contrary. We recommend clients to schedule their migration to start no later than Q2 2018. So to answer the question, when’s the right time to move from Magento 1 to Magento? The time to start is now.
• M1 EE clients may have more “breathing room” given the recent blog post. However, all of our EE client’s rely on custom, complex integrations and extensions that we developed and refined the years. These are not compatible with the M2 platform, so they will need to be refactored. Therefore when considering the planning and budgeting issues, an 18-month advance notice is not a lot of time.

We remain committed to Magento, as it remains an excellent commerce solution that provides unparalleled opportunities for customization and extensibility.

But given that our first commitment if to our clients, we will continue to speak candidly whenever Magento is less than forthcoming with its plans or may head in a direction that isn’t in our clients’ best interests. For the same reason we continue to explore other commerce solutions over time. And stay tuned, we’ll update this blog as new developments unfold.