After much speculation, plenty of industry excitement and preparation, the highly anticipated new version of Magento ecommerce platform has finally arrived.
Magento has proven to be an incredibly popular platform with over 4 million downloads over the last five years and today they have officially launched Magento 2.0 at MagentoLive, Australia.
In case you missed it live, here are the goals of Magento 2.0 as highlighted by Magento:
- Updating the technology stack
- Streamline the customization process
- Simplifying the process for external integrations
- Improving the scalability and performance
- Improvements to the installation procedure
- Easier upgrade process
- The delivery of better quality, testing resources, and documentation
And here are some of the big changes Magento 2 users will benefit from:
- Full page caching: Improved performance and scalability is one of the key goals Magento developers aim to reach. This cutting-edge change will result in minimization of the server load by up to 25% of the loading time compared to previous versions. This means being able to handle more traffic without added hosting costs.
- jQuery: Using the most popular Javascript library not only simplifies scripting, but significantly decreases the amount of Javascript conflicts.
- Simplified process of upgrading core software and Magento 2 extensions: Thanks to new tools such as independent script installer and automatic compatibility pre-upgrade checkups, the time and effort needed for Magento 1.X installation and upgrade is significantly reduced in the 2.0 version. In addition, system requirements and components dependencies are now built right into the code of extensions, which markedly speeds up the installation process.
- Admin panel menu: With Magento 2 the admin panel is conveniently grouped by function. The main menu has been simplified and restructured to speed up your work and ease new users in.
- Magento 2 advanced toolbar: Reveals numerous usability improvements including a new Products menu section which makes adding new product or editing an existing one as simple as it gets.
- Default Blank theme: This decreases costs and efforts spent on front-end. Combined with Magento UI Library with its useful set of mix-ins, developing theme and customizing each user interface element has never been easier.
- Database improvement: Magento 2 offers an additional database for order management. This simplifies checkout process and secures a dedicated resource for customers. Enhanced database also allows multiple admin users to manage products and orders and prevents data conflicts.
- Checkout process: This change will have your customers cheering! Magento 2 completely reinvents the checkout from the point of view of a regular buyer, eliminating annoying obligation to create an account before making a purchase. In addition, some other changes include automatic determination of the credit card type and establishing shipping address solely by entering a ZIP code.
- Testing: Magento has always been really hard to test, which makes the developer’s job more difficult and error-prone. Magento 2 has built-in testing allowing developers to add tests easily.
Magento2 is certainly a colossal step for Magento, and it’s a bit of a step up for the code release in terms of technology, performance and coding standards. Magento 2 reveals that they are committed to keep improving itself and that this ecommerce platform is here to stay.
If you're interested in learning how ParadoxLabs can help you out with the Magento changes in the works, contact us today!