The first steps

Hyvä was created by Willem Wigman. I lost track of when I met Willem for the first time. I took a Magento-break somewhere in the middle of the Magento 1 adventure, I was busy with Joomla for some time. And then I came back to Magento right before the release of Magento 2. And some time after, I met (again) with Willem and we started to chat about what a disaster the new Magento 2 frontend was. Fast forward, he invited me and Jeroen Boersma to work together to build a React checkout and we never invested much to make this work. Fail. On our side, because Willem started working on this anyway.

Apparently, this just made the itch that Willem felt grow and grow. Because sooner or later, when I organized Reacticon 3 (October 2020), Willem first announced his secret work: Hyvä. And the rest is history. Hyvä attracted a lot of attention, started to sell its work, agencies joined, a company was founded, Vinai and others joined. And nowadays, it is safe to say that Hyvä has changed the life of numerous Magento developers already.

What Yireo did

Appart from organizing Reacticon, I felt that Hyvä was the frontend that Magento has needed for years (or am I stealing this phrase from the Hyvä marketing team). I dived into Hyvä, created a video course about Hyvä (which is still part of my Yireo On-Demand course portfolio). And currently, I'm running a Yireo Academy for Magento development over a period of 8 weeks - and 1 week is dedicated to Hyvä development.

Apart from this, I dived into development a tiny bit as well. There were some minor things I brought to Hyvä itself (or maybe mostly questions). The React Checkout caught my attention as well. And for educational purpose I created an example extension to extend upon this React Checkout, not only the Magento way but also the Webpack way. (In the mean time, all of this work is scrapped, because Webpack has been swapped with Vite: I hope to create a Vite override plugin somewhere in the future though.)

The Van Zuidams

And then there the Van Zuidams. I met Ruud van Zuidam a long time ago in the Joomla community. And we have been friends ever since. As soon as we noticed Hyvä, we both dived into it, each in our own way. Me creating a course, Ruud coding away.

When you meet Ruud, you'll probably meet Sean (his son) sooner or later. Sean van Zuidam works for a Dutch agency Mooore, but together with Ruud he has crafted up numerous modules that enhance Hyvä (ViewModels, icon sets, etcetera). Plus Sean is the creator of Fylgja, a customizable CSS framework, which could replace TailwindCSS in the Hyvä stack. That single move is maybe not everybody's piece of cake, but it is proofing that Hyvä is ready for changes if people don't like TailwindCSS.

The bonding between Ruud, Sean and me is there: They have joined the Yireo team whenever an event came up (Magento 2 Seminar, MageTestFest, Reacticon) and they will also join again with the upcoming MageUnconference NL this July. We had little 3-person hackathons, collaborated in pointless projects (Ruud?, wtf?, using Magento 2 as a GraphQL client for WordPress?) and will come up with much more in the future. They are not necessarily part of the Yireo company (which is a one-man company), but they are definitely part of the Yireo team. And their work with Hyvä is something I fully support, advocate and love.

More Hyvä

This almost feels like a Hyvä loveletter. But it is also trying to set a path for the future. Slowly I'm becoming convinced that it is my task as a Magento teacher to make it clear to people that Hyvä is a better frontend. On the Yireo site, various Magento frontends are mentioned (Luma, PWA Studio, Vue Storefront and Hyvä) and I'm doing training with all. But perhaps, I should start with Hyvä and then mention that Luma is a lesser frontend.

Also, there have been huge developments in the Hyvä ecosystem in the last couple of months: Tailwind was upgraded from 2 to 3, Alpine was upgraded from 2 to 3. And the new Magewire Checkout came out. The current courseware (used on the online courseware portal and in live trainings) has been updated already for this, but new videos might be created for all of this in the near future as well.

Hyvä compatiblity modules

And there is the topic of Magento modules needing to be made compatible for Hyvä as well. The new version 3 of the Yireo GoogleTagManager has been released with built-in support for Hyvä (so no compatibility module is needed anymore). And the plan is to do the same for other modules like the Yireo NextGenImages and Yireo WebP2.

Other modules like LinkPreload, CheckoutTester2 and obviously the CommonViewModels library already work fine with Hyvä, but it would be nice to advocate Hyvä a bit more there.

And more

I'm keen to see Hyvä grow even further. Not just because it might be good business for me (I'm being transparent here) but the more because it is fixing the Magento ecosystem. It helps developers onboard Magento quicker, it makes existing developers happier, it lowers the price of a shop (which makes merchants happier). Happy happy joy joy. Because of this, my plans for the upcoming years will definitely involve Hyvä more and more: Open source contributions, Hyvä-focused events, extended courses and much more. Hyvä, I love you.