Over the last few months, Magento has announced some interesting new partnerships and functionality. Some of these features are already available and some are still to come, but all are exciting steps forward for Magento users.
At the end of 2016, Magento announced that they had acquired the technology behind BlueFoot, a content management system and page builder that was previously available as a module. Magento wanted to integrate the technology into the core of Magento in order to “empower Magento merchants to exert greater control and creativity over the digital experiences they deliver to their customers.”
Currently, Magento pages are built using HTML or the out of the box Magento WYSIWYG, and widgets can be pulled or coded into the layout as well. BlueFoot, however, is a drag-and-drop interface, making it much easier for users to manage site content and layout. Other capabilities include:
While the BlueFoot/Magento integration is not yet complete, the current version of BlueFoot is available exclusively for licensed Magento Enterprise Edition or Enterprise Cloud Edition merchants with Magento version 2.1 and up.
Magento announced their partnership with Acquia back in November. This gives Magento users access to Acquia’s cloud-based Drupal CMS service.
Drupal is a fully-featured, PHP-based content management system. This partnership provides an integration framework for Drupal and Magento, giving users many more options. By combining these two platforms, users can scale Magento as they need it. For example, if you have a website with large amounts of content as well as a Magento eCommerce store, all of that content could be managed through Drupal and integrated with Magento for shopping.
While there aren’t many details out about the partnership, it does provide more dynamic options for content management on Magento.
Magento recently acquired RJMetrics, now known as Magento Business Intelligence. This fully customizable tool allows merchants to consolidate multiple data sources to one cloud-based data warehouse. This allows merchants faster and more accurate access to their data and information.
Prior to the RJMetrics acquisition, Magento users typically had to rely on something like Google Analytics or their backend system for reporting. Magento Business Intelligence, however, is targeted towards both business and technical users in order to help deliver and clarify data.
This opens up many new options for Magento users turn a myriad of disparate data sources into actionable insights. Enterprise Edition users have access to a free, entry-level version of Magento Business Intelligence, with additional options available to add to your site as well.
Magento has also said that they intend to release some B2B functionality by the end of the year. These updates will allow for things like organizational buying, multiple users per customer, customer specific pricing, and catalog filtering. All of this will be available as default functionality, meaning that B2B users will be able to leverage Magento right out of the box.
Are you interested in learning more about these new features, or want to get started implementing them on your Magento site? Contact our team.
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