Learn how to keep your eCommerce store on Magento 1 after end of life deadline.

Learn how to keep your eCommerce store on Magento 1 after end of life deadline.
Magento 1 End of Life deadline

Your Version of Magento Open Source Sunsets in 2020.

“Your version of Open Source 1 is sunsetting. Migration assistance available.”

“Support for your free version of Magento ends in 2020. It’s time to migrate to Magento 2 with funding assistance available. “

“Magento Open Source 1 is sunsetting. Migration assistance and funding available.”

If you’re an e-commerce merchant on Magento 1, you’ve probably seen some variation of these scary messages in your Admin control panel. Maybe you’ve lost sleep over the past few months, ever since Magento announced their June 2020 End of Life for Magento 1.

You may have already gotten a 5- or 6-figure quote on how much your Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration is going to cost. But with COVID-19 shaking up every part of your business, maybe you don’t have the time or budget for a major forced migration.

But what the Magento 1 End of Life actually means for most merchants isn’t clear, and it’s made even more confusing by all the official Magento partners that want to sell you on an expensive migration to Magento 2. Magento, Inc also wants to use this as an opportunity to sell you on a Magento Cloud license (the fine print says that “migration assistance” only comes with a 42-month long contract).

But if you’re on the Magento Community Edition, as hundreds of thousands of merchants still are, you have another option.

What will happen on June 1st, 2020?

You might be wondering what will happen if you don’t do anything before June 2020…

Nothing.

Your store won’t shut off and when you log in to your Admin you won’t see anything different (except for Magento will probably send you 10 more annoying popups that “support” has expired).

If you’re on the Enterprise (paid) version you Magento will let you extend your license, but they will no longer supply you with patches or support.

Magento is Open Source

The reason for this is that Magento CE is open source. Magento explains what this means on their own website:

“You may download, modify, use, and distribute the open source Software. You can be assured that Magento will continue to thrive because all contributions made to the software by you and others must be made available under the same OSL 3.0 license.” (https://magento.com/legal/licensing)

What does that mean exactly?

That means that you have a right to use and modify Magento CE for however long you want. And the only thing changing after June 2020 is that Magento, Inc, who hasn’t been releasing new feature versions of Magento 1 ever since they released Magento 2 over 2 years ago, will not regularly be releasing security patches (the infamous SUPEE patches).

But what about security?

But if you’re a conscientious merchant that always patches their store then hearing that Magento won’t release security patches scares you. You might be wondering if Magento won’t release security patches at all then who will?

The same people that have actually been reporting and fixing the majority of the code in those patches that Magento has been releasing: The open source community.

Hearing that, you might be a little freaked out that random developers from all over the world are going to be patching your software through “open source”. But if you look at one of the recent patches in the “reporter” section, you’ll notice the majority of them are Twitter or GitHub handles. These are not Magento employees. These are independent developers.

Not to mention the fact that you’re already using many open source products in your eCommerce store. All the servers that Magento 1, Magento 2 and most other major e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Shopify as well as 96.5% of the top 1 million websites run on Linux, an open-source operating system made up of thousands of individual pieces of open source software.

Still, you might be thinking:

“Alright, that’s great that developers are going to fixing potential security issues, but how do I find those developers after Magento stops releasing the patches?“

How we can help

That’s where we can help. I’ve personally been a Magento developer and part of the Magento community of developers for almost a decade. Most of my team has been working with Magento for nearly as long. A majority of our clients on Magento 1 have already made the decision to stay on Magento 1, and we’re going to be supporting them for the foreseeable future.

We can help guide you as you feel like you might be venturing into uncharted waters by ensuring that your store is safe and secure. We‘ll be there to advise you on anything Magento-related like hosting, extensions, custom design or development.

If you’re interested in talking more, drop us a line:

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Headshot of Mark Lewis
Mark Lewis
Founder & CTO

Mark Lewis brings over 15 years of web development expertise and over 8 years of eCommerce development experience working with Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce. Prior to founding Netalico, Mark worked for multiple web development agencies, startups, Hewlett Packard and NASA.

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