Mage-OS Initiatives

Streamlining eCommerce Returns with Mage-OS RMA

mage-os-team — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:00:00 GMT

At Mage-OS, progress is built collaboratively. The new RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) module is a clear example of that approach in action — designed, refined, and stabilized through focused effort and thoughtful contributions from the community.

A significant part of this work has been driven by Samuele Martini, whose attention to detail, refactoring efforts, and careful code reviews helped bring the module to a stable and production-ready state. This release reflects not just functionality, but maturity.

What the Module Delivers

The RMA module is designed to make returns more transparent and manageable for both customers and merchants, without adding unnecessary complexity.

Customers can initiate return requests directly from their order summary page or through a dedicated “Returns” section in their account. For guest users, the process is equally accessible via Magento’s native guest order lookup.

Once a return is created, the experience becomes more interactive and structured:

Customers can define the reason for the return, item condition, and preferred outcome (refund, exchange, etc.)
A built-in comment thread works like a live chat, enabling direct communication with the merchant
File attachments (images and videos) can be added at any stage, helping document item condition or logistics like shipping labels

Communication is handled proactively. Customers and administrators receive notifications when returns are created or updated, ensuring visibility across the process.

On the administrative side, flexibility is a key strength. Merchants can configure:

Return statuses and workflows
Resolution types and return reasons
Item condition states
Email notification templates

Returns can be managed centrally, including full access to the conversation history with customers.

Built for Extension

From a technical perspective, the module is intentionally extensible. It exposes events that allow developers to integrate additional workflows such as store credit refunds or automated courier pickups. This makes it adaptable to a wide range of operational needs without requiring core modifications.

Learn More

For a complete overview, implementation details, and technical documentation, refer to the official README.

Recognition

This release would not be possible without the contributions of the Mage-OS community. Special recognition goes to Sam for the work on this module.

The RMA module represents a practical, extensible solution shaped by real-world needs — and a reminder of what focused collaboration can achieve within the Mage-OS ecosystem.

Mage-OS WidgetKit: A More Mature Page Builder Experience

davide-lunardon — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mage-OS WidgetKit is a suite of ready-to-use CMS widgets for Magento’s Page Builder, built from the ground up to work with the Hyvä frontend theme. After more than a year of steady development, it has grown into a mature toolkit for building and managing Page Builder content.

This is the result of work led by Davide Lunardon, with valuable contributions from Samuele Martini, Yuriy Boyko, and Luca Fuser, and ongoing support from the broader community. It reflects months of iterative development driven by real-world needs — the goal has been consistent from the beginning: to improve how content is created and managed in Magento without increasing complexity for developers or editors.

A practical evolution of Page Builder

Magento’s Page Builder has always been a powerful tool, but extending it often required significant effort, especially when building custom components or trying to achieve accurate previews.

WidgetKit changes that dynamic. Widgets are developed with previews that are directly tied to the frontend output — what you see during editing is much closer to what users will actually experience. This reduces guesswork and removes the need for duplicated logic between backend previews and frontend rendering.

The development process becomes more straightforward as a result. Instead of building complex abstractions, developers can focus on frontend implementation and reuse it consistently.

More flexibility where it matters

Another area of improvement is configuration. Through the companion Mage-OS AdvancedWidget module, widgets are no longer constrained to simple inputs. Teams can define structured and reusable configurations, including repeatable fields, media inputs, and product selections.

This has a direct impact on how content teams work. Instead of requesting frequent developer intervention, editors can compose richer layouts and reuse them across pages with greater autonomy.

Moving content between environments

One of the recurring challenges in Magento projects is moving Page Builder content between environments. The suite addresses that through the module-pagebuilder-template-import-export module.

With import and export capabilities for templates and CMS blocks, teams can move content from development to staging and production in a controlled and predictable way. This reduces friction in deployment workflows and improves consistency across environments.

Ready-to-use components

WidgetKit ships a set of prebuilt widgets designed to work out-of-the-box with Hyvä:

Slideshow — the original widget
Slider — content carousel for images, videos, or custom HTML
Product slider — a product-aware carousel
Grid — a flexible content grid
Product grid — a product-focused companion to the content grid

Each widget uses twind to compile Tailwind classes at preview time and resolves Alpine.js bindings inside the admin stage, so previews behave like real Hyvä components rather than stripped-down placeholders. A short walkthrough is available on YouTube.

Installation

WidgetKit requires Hyvä and PHP 8.1 or newer. Install via Composer:

composer require mage-os/module-widgetkit
bin/magento module:enable MageOS_Widgetkit
bin/magento setup:upgrade

The complementary modules — PageBuilderWidget, AdvancedWidget, and PageBuilder Template Import/Export — can be installed independently depending on the capabilities you need.

Documentation and ongoing work

Comprehensive documentation for the Page Builder suite is available and continuously evolving: dadolun95.github.io/mage-os-pagebuilder-suite

The documentation is automatically generated and will continue to improve with community feedback and contributions. It covers the full suite, including WidgetKit and related modules.

Community driven development

The suite reflects a focused effort led by Davide Lunardon, who not only initiated the project but also shaped its direction around real developer and merchant needs — a system that prioritizes usability, extensibility, and alignment with modern frontend workflows.

Contributions from Samuele Martini, Yuriy Boyko, and Luca Fuser played a key role in refining implementation details, improving reliability, and validating the approach across different use cases. The broader Mage-OS community has ensured quality through code reviews, feedback loops, and structured release management.

The result is not just a feature set, but a shared baseline the community can build upon.

Closing thoughts

Mage-OS WidgetKit represents a shift toward a more usable and maintainable Page Builder experience. It simplifies development, improves editorial workflows, and introduces tools that make content more portable.

The project remains fully open source. Feedback, contributions, and real-world usage will continue to guide its direction.

The Evolution of Documentation in the Age of AI: A Magento Case Study

anita-miller — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

David Lambauer and run_as_root: Innovating Magento Documentation with AI

In the ever-evolving world of e-commerce, documentation remains a critical but often overlooked component. David Lambauer, founder of run_as_root, has been at the forefront of improving Magento documentation through innovative approaches, leveraging AI and open-source collaboration.

Who is David Lambauer?

David Lambauer is a seasoned developer and entrepreneur with a deep passion for open-source software and high-quality development practices. His journey into the tech world began with a traditional German Fachinformatiker apprenticeship (IT Specialist Training), followed by university studies in computer science. However, his real expertise was shaped through hands-on experience in the industry, particularly in Magento development.

How Did He End Up with Magento?

David was introduced to Magento while working at his first workplace, at Netz98, under the mentorship of Christian Münch. His first real test came when he attempted a Magento-related coding challenge. After spending an entire day on it, Münch demonstrated a far more efficient solution in just a few minutes—an eye-opening moment that inspired him to fully commit to learning Magento.

He later expanded his knowledge in infrastructure and scalable systems. These experiences paved the way for him to launch his own agency, run_as_root, with a focus on high-quality Magento solutions.

run_as_root: A New Approach to Magento Development

Founded with the goal of simplifying Magento development, run_as_root emphasizes long-term client relationships and transparency. Unlike traditional agencies that focus on constantly acquiring new clients, run_as_root is dedicated to providing sustainable, well-documented, and high-quality solutions. One of its standout features is its detailed, automated billing system, which ensures that clients know exactly what they’re paying for.

How Did He Develop AI-Generated Magento Documentation?

One of David’s biggest contributions to the Magento community is his work on developer documentation. After Adobe acquired Magento, there was concern over the future of open-source contributions. During this time, David was already contributing to Magento’s DevDocs and saw an opportunity to improve them using automation.

To address this, he created Dev Docs v1.0, a documentation project designed to help new developers get started with Magento.

Using GPT-3.5, he built an AI-powered system that could generate well-structured developer documentation. He based his approach on Laravel’s documentation model, where content is stored as Markdown files in a repository. His process included:

Creating a structured outline of essential Magento topics using AI.
Generating content for each topic with AI assistance.
Formatting everything into Markdown, making it easy to maintain and update.

To make improvements easier, he also added an “Edit on GitHub” button, allowing anyone to contribute fixes or updates. This method leverages a simple reality: people are more likely to correct mistakes than to write new documentation from scratch.

What Were the Challenges?

Despite its success, developing AI-driven documentation wasn’t without obstacles:

Ensuring Accuracy: AI-generated content needed manual review to ensure reliability.
Building a Solid Knowledge Base: The documentation had to cover enough depth to be useful.
Keeping Up with AI Improvements: AI models continue to evolve, meaning the process needs to be updated over time.

David continues to explore new ways to refine AI-generated documentation. One possibility is an AI-assisted query system, where instead of reading static documentation, developers ask an AI assistant questions and receive real-time responses based on well-structured prompts.

How Does He Want to Continue Developing the Documentation?

David sees multiple ways to evolve Magento documentation further:

Enhancing AI-Generated Documentation – Using more advanced AI models like GPT-4 and future iterations to improve content quality, making it more detailed and technically accurate.
AI-Driven Interactive Assistance – Instead of static documentation, an AI-powered chatbot or search tool could provide tailored answers to developer questions in real time.
Crowdsourced Community Contributions – Expanding community involvement by making it easier for developers to suggest edits, provide examples, and validate content.
Integrating Documentation into Development Tools – Embedding documentation directly into developer environments, making it accessible while coding.
Iterative Prompting for Higher Quality – Structuring AI-generated documentation by first defining tone, keywords, reference materials, and output formats before generating final content.

These approaches reflect Lambauer’s commitment to making Magento documentation more dynamic, accessible, and reliable for developers worldwide.

What Does He Like About Magento?

David appreciates Magento for its maturity and strong developer community. Unlike other platforms where basic coding practices are still debated, the Magento ecosystem fully embraces advanced development methodologies like Unit Testing, Integration Testing, and Continuous Integration/Deployment.

He also values Magento’s flexibility and scalability, making it an excellent choice for complex e-commerce solutions. Its open-source nature encourages innovation and long-term community contributions.

What Is His Relation to Mage-OS?

Mage-OS was created in response to the slowdown in Magento’s open-source development after Adobe’s acquisition. David saw Mage-OS as a way to unify the fragmented Magento community, which had been scattered across different Slack groups, regional meetups, and independent developer initiatives.

Seeing the need for better documentation, he took charge of Mage-OS’s documentation project, ensuring that developers have access to up-to-date resources. His work with Mage-OS reinforces his commitment to keeping Magento open-source and community-driven.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Magento Documentation

David Lambauer’s work highlights the power of community-driven innovation in open-source software. His contributions to Magento documentation, combined with modern AI-driven approaches, showcase a new way forward for developer resources.

With run_as_root continuing to push boundaries in Magento development, one key question remains: Is traditional documentation still relevant, or will AI-powered interactive systems take over? No matter the outcome, David and his team are at the forefront of this exciting transformation in developer support.

Transforming Magento: The Power of Community, Contributions, and Innovation

anita-miller — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

E-commerce is constantly changing, and Magento continues to be a leading platform, providing great tools for developers and businesses. Two exciting additions to this system have recently stood out: the Automatic Translations Module and the PageBuilder Import-Export Module. Created by Davide Lunardon, Luca Fuser and Samuele Martini, these tools aim to make Magento even more useful and easy to use.

The Automatic Translations Module

How It Was Developed

During the Covid period, Samuele Martini began exploring generative AI technologies, particularly OpenAI, with the goal of innovating within e-commerce. An old challenge resurfaced: years ago, a client requested automatic product description generation during ERP imports, which was not feasible at the time.

Fast-forward to a new client of Davide Lunardon, who needed to expand into the French market but lacked translated product data. Given high translation costs and the prospect of further expansions, Samuele and Davide revisited the AI-based module concept, integrating it with DeepL, OpenAI, and Google Gemini to create high-quality translations at a fraction of the cost. The result was an efficient, scalable translation module for Magento.

The module enables the translation of all entities, including products, categories, CMS pages, and static blocks, into almost any language. For the product catalog, it offers two modes: a manual option, accessible via a button in the admin panel, and an automatic mode using cron jobs. The automatic mode includes configurable control systems to prevent the retranslation of manually modified products while allowing forced retranslation if descriptions in the primary language change. Categories, CMS pages, and static blocks, however, can only be translated manually via the admin panel button. Given the module’s effectiveness, we decided to make it available to communities through Mage-OS.

Challenges in Development

Handling HTML in Descriptions – Ensuring AI engines preserved structural elements while translating text was complex.
Prompt Engineering – While DeepL required no prompts, OpenAI and Gemini needed specific instructions to produce quality translations.
Attribute Translation – Unlike textual attributes, select and multiselect attributes store only IDs, requiring a separate translation mechanism.
Alt Text Handling – Since Magento associates alt text with a “gallery” entity, special logic was needed to integrate it seamlessly.

Today, the module allows merchants to translate products, categories, CMS pages, and static blocks either manually or automatically via cron jobs, ensuring efficient multilingual expansion. Recognizing its potential, Samuele and Davide made it available to the Mage-OS community.

PageBuilder Import-Export Module

How It Was Developed

Magento’s PageBuilder is widely used for content management, but one major limitation has always been the inability to export and import CMS pages and blocks between environments. Recognizing this issue, Davide Lunardon proposed an extension to enable seamless content transfers.

The module allows users to export templates as zip files containing:

template.html (HTML content)
preview.jpg (visual representation)
config.xml (metadata configuration)
Children folder (nested CMS blocks)
Asset folder (related images)

Additionally, a Dropbox API integration enables remote template imports. This innovation means merchants can now version and distribute CMS content efficiently across sites.

Challenges in Development

Recursive CMS Dependency Handling – Extracting interdependent assets and templates in a structured manner was a significant challenge.
Choosing the Right Remote Service – A flexible API solution was needed for sustainable integration with Mage-OS.

Supported by fellow developers Luca Fuser and Samuele Martini, Davide’s vision took shape, and the module is now actively being refined for stability and efficiency.

The module was created by Samuele Martini and Davide Lunardon, two experienced developers with a strong background in e-commerce solutions.

About the Developers

Samuele, a developer from Treviso, Italy, has a diverse academic background in statistics, business management, and computer science. After earning his degree from the University of Padua in 2011, he built his career across multiple web agencies, progressing from developer to technical director. In 2025, he decided to start his own business, collaborating with Davide, a longtime friend and former colleague.

Davide is a passionate web developer and an amateur table tennis player. Since becoming a freelancer in late 2020, he has primarily worked with companies and agencies in Italy, bringing his expertise in web development to various projects. Together, Samuele and Davide combined their skills to develop this module, aiming to make translation in e-commerce more efficient and accessible.

How They Discovered Magento

Samuele and Davide’s journey with Magento began at different times, but for similar reasons – its flexibility and power as an e-commerce platform.

Davide first encountered Magento in 2016 while working on projects for one of the companies he was employed at. It was instant love, especially with Magento 1, as Magento 2 was not yet fully stable at the time. The platform’s capabilities and potential drew him in, sparking his deep interest in e-commerce development.

For Samuele, the transition to Magento came as a strategic decision. Initially working on corporate websites with WordPress, he witnessed the agency he worked for pivot toward e-commerce due to the industry’s rapid growth. During their research, they evaluated multiple platforms, including Prestashop, Shopware, and Magento. After a detailed analysis, Samuele recommended Magento because it functioned more like a framework than a traditional CMS, making it ideal for custom, scalable developments. This adaptability made it the perfect choice for handling complex, tailored e-commerce projects.

Their shared passion for Magento eventually led them to specialize in the platform, laying the foundation for their later collaboration and the development of their module.

What They Love About Magento

Both Samuele and Davide appreciate Magento for its robustness, flexibility, and developer-friendly architecture, which makes it a powerful tool for building and maintaining e-commerce platforms.

For Samuele, Magento’s greatest strength is its comprehensiveness. Unlike other platforms that are still catching up on essential features like wishlists and bundled products, Magento has offered these since 2007. From a developer’s perspective, Magento provides an innovative yet intuitive set of patterns that make extending functionality seamless. Features like preferences, plugins, viewModels, virtual types, argument preferences, and dependency injection are unique tools not commonly found in other PHP frameworks, making Magento an extremely versatile and customizable platform.

Davide values Magento’s elasticity and the structured framework that enables scalability and maintainability when managed correctly. The dependency injection system, virtual types, and plugin architecture give developers unparalleled control over customizations. Additionally, its open-source nature allows for deep, ad-hoc integrations tailored to specific business needs. He also highlights the out-of-the-box features that have been present since Magento 1 and continue in Magento 2, making it a large, stable, and complete codebase for e-commerce development. For Davide, working on complex e-commerce projects without Magento would be unimaginable.

Their Relationship with Mage-OS

Mage-OS provides an independent, community-driven environment for Magento development. It ensures that Magento remains open-source and continues evolving with valuable features. Through their contributions, Davide and Samuele have enhanced Magento’s capabilities, making it more accessible and powerful for businesses worldwide. Both Samuele and Davide see Mage-OS as a crucial initiative for preserving and expanding Magento’s open-source ecosystem, allowing them to contribute to the platform in ways that weren’t possible before.

Samuele first learned about Mage-OS through Alessandro Ronchi and was immediately drawn to its clear objectives. He sees its role as twofold: first, ensuring that Magento remains open source, no matter what; and second, enhancing Magento’s core functionality, rather than just integrating Adobe SaaS services. Samuele has actively contributed by working on an AI-powered automatic translation suite alongside Davide, and participating in the OpenAI integration module developed by Ryan Sun.

For Davide, Mage-OS represents freedom – the ability to contribute to Magento without restrictions imposed by corporate ownership. While he acknowledges Adobe’s contributions, he feels that Magento has changed significantly since the acquisition. With Mage-OS, he can now develop and release tools that directly benefit the Magento ecosystem, something he couldn’t do while working within agencies. Seeing how much Magento has shaped his career, he is eager to give back to the community and help restore Magento’s reputation and strength through Mage-OS.

With the Automatic Translations Module and PageBuilder Import-Export Module, Magento developers and merchants can now work more efficiently, scale into new markets, and manage content seamlessly. As Mage-OS grows, these innovations will help shape the future of the Magento ecosystem.