Frontend & Hyvä 3/14/2022

The Hyvä Community: Behind the Scenes

If you are reading this, you probably know that Hyvä Themes is a commercial product, providing a new frontend for Magento 2 which improves website performance and development speed a lot. You can find a lot of information about the product online:

Due to its size, the Hyvä community may be less visible than e.g. the Magento community in general, but it's vibrant and active. It has a huge impact on the product and everything around it. In this blog post, we give some insights into the Hyvä community.

Slack - The Central Communication Platform

At the moment, there are around 1,500 people in the closed Hyvä Slack space. In general, every company which bought at least one Hyvä Themes license can add as many of their team members to the Slack space as they would like.

Screenshot of slack channels

The Hyvä Slack is used for all kinds of communication:

  • questions about features

  • support requests

  • discussions about new features and general direction

  • information about supported extensions and their compatibilty modules

  • showcasing new shops built with Hyvä

  • announcements of new releases and Hyvä-centric events

Just a little sample about the activity in the Hyvä Slack: in the last 24 hours before writing this text, there have been 8 new topics with 40 answers in the #general channel alone, covering topics such as development environments, a new release, caching, payment methods, sliders and CAPTCHAs.


GitLab - Everything around the Code

GitLab is used as a code repository and version control system. This is where the technical progress is happening. It contains

  • the Hyvä Themes core code
  • the Adobe Commerce compatibility modules
  • the compatibility modules for third-party modules
  • and some auxilliary modules and tools.

Both core and community developers heavily rely on open source methods: with merge requests / pull requests, code reviews and open discussions. GitLab supports all that.
(Note for non-developers: merge and pull requests, reviews and discussions, along with many other processes, are part of the developer's workflow. They facilitate collaboration across countries and time zones and help ensure the quality of the code).
So far, almost 700 merge requests have been merged:

screenshot of slack


Events around Hyvä

During the pandemic, there have been no live events. Instead, several online events have happened:

Interest in the past events was high, and the feedback was great:

Influenced by the Magento Community

The Hyvä community is part of the bigger Magento Community, and that's where a lot of inspiration comes from. There are several persons in the center of the Hyvä community which have been around the Magento community for a long time, some of them have been around for ten years or more, and that's where they learned that all players profit from open source and open collaboration if done right. And it is certainly being done right in the Hyvä community.

Led by Positive Example

Willem Wigman and Vinai Kopp are the faces of Hyvä Themes. Right from the start, both of them have put a lot of effort into creating a positive community vibe, e.g. by communicating clearly what to expect, providing plenty of information around updates, thanking contributors in public for any update they were involved in and answering questions from the community and thus setting the tone for a community where people help each other, celebrate other teams' successes and appreciate their contributions. This is the real super power of Hyvä.