On the Liip blog there's a post about the release of Magento 2, the latest and hugely reworked version of the popular eCommerce platform. The post walks you through the installation of this latest update using a pre-configured Vagrant machine.

I’ve downloaded my M2 sample from the official Magento website, there I also found an archive with sample data. For a setup I used a pre-configured Vagrant machine according to the installation guide for Magento server. This installation guide offers two options: easy and advanced. Let’s try the easy way first ;) M2 has an installation wizard, so it is supposed that even a none technically prepared user can install it successfully. And indeed, it looks easy.

He walks through some of the issues he had importing the data during the installation, ultimately, falling back to a command line call to push the large sample data into the platform.

You can find out more about this release and get the latest version over on the Magento website with plenty of information about what's been improved, added and how to get started using this latest version.

The 7PHP.com site has a tutorial they've recently posted showing you how to get Magnto 2 installed on an AWS instance running LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL and PHP).

This article tries to demonstrate how to setup an AWS (EC2) instance, installing a LEMP stack, preparing the server environment to meet Magento’s requirements and then to finally install Magento v2 using command line approach. [...] I’m presenting in this article something which might otherwise seem to be a daunting approach – but I also see it as an approach which you can later automate by using Docker/Dockerfile for example or even using a Vagrant appliance.

He takes you through the entire process, including the setup of the account and instance on the AWS side, with screenshots along the way:

• Creating a Free Tier AWS Account
• Preparing & Configuring your AWS EC2 Instance
• Creating A Security Group For Our AWS EC2 Instance
• Creating a PEM file – Key Pairs
• Creating our AWS EC2 Instance
• Creating an Elastic IP & Assigning to our EC2 Instance
• Preparing & Configuring our AWS EC2 Instance
• Installing Our LEMP Stack
• The Magento 2 Project Installation Walkthrough
• Configuring nginx conf file to serve our magento site
• Creating a database & running The Magento Setup From Commandline

You'll find all the commands, screenshots and output examples you'll need to follow along with the tutorial easily. There's also links to other resources if you're interested in finding out more about the setup.

Kevin Schroeder continues his series of posts looking at using Magento 2 and creating customizations of the application. In this latest post he builds on the previous post about dependency injection and shows how to configure Magento's container.

The purpose of that post was to, perhaps, make you less apprehensive about using DI combined with the DIC in Magento 2. However, in this post I want to go a little deeper into the DIC, implemented via the MagentoObjectManagerObjectManager class, and talk about how to configure it. Configuration for the DIC is done in each module’s etc/di.xml file or etc//di.xml. Because you can split DIC configuration based on the area this tells you that the /config/ naming stuff is over; which I applaud.

He focuses more specifically on two of the child nodes that can be defined - "type" and "preference" (you can also have "virtualType" as well). First up is "type" and he gives a simple example class in his "HelloWorld" example that just takes in a message and returns it when asked. He shows it in use and how to set up the "di.xml" configuration for the class, defining the "message" parameter in the configuration instead of in the object fetch (like the first example).

Kevin Schroeder is continuing his current trend of posts with another new one about Magento 2 and using deendency injection and how to use it inside your Magento extension code.

I wrote an introduction to Dependency Injection for Zend Framework a while back and was able to work out some of the kinks in my understanding of how a DI container worked with 4 blog posts. It took a while for me to get it but much of what I learned for Zend Framework does directly apply for Magento 2. Dependency Injection is handled in Magento 2 via the class MagentoAppObjectManager. And if you look at that from within the context of Magento 2 you are probably pooping your pants. 200+ class instances, configuration options, dogs and cats living together.

He starts with a simple script that calls the DI container to get an instance of a "Test" class. He talks about the difference between this and calling "new" and gives a bit more complex example with a custom "Test2" class. It's only slightly more complex as he shows how an instance of "Test2" with a property of a "Test" instance gets created and built out and injected into the "Test2" class on initialization.

Kevin Schroeder has posted a step-by-step guide to his site today about creating a module for Magento in the first of a series of posts about Magento.

I believe that one of the best ways to learn something is to write out what it is you are learning. This forces you to think through the concepts and determine how to explain them to others. In doing so you are forced to use terms that are familiar to describe this new thing. This helps to solidify the concepts in your own mind, making it easier to remember. But still, there are three caveats: Magento 2 is not out yet, I'm learning as I write and what I share is what I see (my interpretation).

He talks about some of the differences between Magento 1 and 2 including:

• The lack of code pools
• Discovery XML files are in a different location
• A different parser for these XML files

With all of this configuration and location information covered, he gets into the actual module building. He makes a simple "Hello World" module with a module.xml, event.xml and an Observer that handles sending the text back to the waiting application.