A new version of Magento (Community Edition) was released on November 17th 2015. We've been looking it over and testing it. The requirements for the software involves changes to versions of PHP as well as the database (MySQL), so we're working on completing our testing with that new software now. We'll have the results out to our clients soon, so please hold tight while we do proper planning for this migration.
You can find out more information about Magento 2.0 here:
Magento 2.0 Developer Hub (magento.com)
and here:
Release Notes - Magento Community Edition 2.0 (docs.magento.com)
We are pleased to present Magento Community Edition 2.0, the next generation of the world’s leading digital commerce platform. See the following summary of important features of the Magento 2.0 release.
Highlights
Flexible architecture supporting innovation and fast time to market
- Modern tech stack based on popular, innovative PHP frameworks and coding patterns that are efficient for developers to use
- Modular code base for making fine-grain customizations and easily adding or removing functionality to meet merchant needs
- Service contracts that provide stable interfaces to business logic to help simplify code customization and ensure smooth upgrades
- Modern theming and layout framework to quickly create and maintain site variations for seasonal campaigns, new product lines, and market expansions
- Extensive and efficient APIs, including new ones for promotions and taxes, to connect and operate at scale with any third party solution
- Automated testing to improve code quality and speed up the QA process for a faster time to market
- Easier upgrades so merchants can quickly add new functionality as it becomes available through quarterly releases
- Data Migration Tool helps transfer existing Magento 1.x store data to Magento 2.0.
Enterprise-level scalability and performance
Performance
- Client-side optimizations, such as minimizing and bundling JavaScript, compressing images, and improving the use of browser caching for static content, increase page load times.
- Server-side improvements, such as integrating Apache Varnish caching, enable faster performance out-of-the-box with minimal tuning.
Scalability
- Standalone databases for key subsystems like order management, product management and checkout; combined with support for MySQL Cluster, enable Magento to scale to handle rapid growth.
- Comprehensive backend improvements enable larger teams to make product updates and process orders at the same time without diminished performance.
Intuitive Admin and efficient business user tools
- The modern Magento Admin user interface is intuitive and easy for new team members to learn, and allows users to efficiently monitor business performance and manage daily tasks.
- The ability to effortlessly customize and save different Admin panel views saves time when managing products, analyzing customer data, and processing orders.
- Setting up products is faster with a new step-by-step product creation tool and improved product data import capabilities that are 4x faster than before.
New shopper experience features to improve engagement, conversion rates, and sales
- The new checkout flow speeds shoppers through the process by minimizing steps and required information.
- It defaults to guest checkout, but automatically recognizes existing registered customers based on their email address and gives them an option to check out faster with their saved profile information.
- Shoppers can conveniently create an account with one click from the order Thank You page, enabling merchants to encourage customer registrations without interrupting the checkout process.
- A detailed order summary with product images encourages shoppers to complete checkout by providing a fast and clear way to see what is in their shopping cart.
- Magento integrates with key payment gateways such as PayPal, Braintree, Authorize.Net, WorldPay (Enterprise Edition only), and CyberSource (Enterprise Edition only) out-of-the-box and allows payment information to be directly passed from the client’s browser to the payment gateway to improve security and enable the easiest level of PCI compliance (depending on the selected payment method).
- The included Blank and Luma themes allow merchants to create engaging, seamless and SEO-friendly shopping experiences in half the time.
The previous release was on October 27, 2015.
Our Website Maintenance Department will be in contact with our clients regarding this upgrade. If you are interested in migrating your website to Magento 2.0 and you are not a client of Webstix yet, please contact us.
-Tony
UPDATE - 12-16-2015:
We're working on amping up our server for the migration to Magento 2.0. We also plan on waiting for extension developers to get caught up and release their versions of software for Magento 2.0. Along with that, we feel it might be best to wait and see if there's a Magento 2.0.1 release that might come out since there are often follow up releases of software shortly after a major version.
Unfortunately, it looks like templates will need to be redesigned, so this isn't a simple upgrade but more of a migration. We're working on figuring out exactly how much work it'll be to migrate a website from Magento 1.9 to 2.0. We'll have that information out soon.
But, the encouraging thing is that this new version appears to be much faster and it's built to handle many more transactions at the same time. Performance and scalability should be much better.
When we know more, we'll post updates here.
-Tony
UPDATE - 12-29-2015:
We've heard from Magento support that the end of life (EOL) for Magento 1.x will be around October 2018. We expect it to be supported until then with patches. They most likely won't be feature upgrades.
-Tony
UPDATE - 01-04-2016:
It's now looking like the most logical time to do this upgrade will be later on - in 5-6 months maybe. Plugins from third parties need to be updated to work with Magento 2.0. What we hear from other developers in the community is that it'll be smarter to wait a bit. One advantage is that the software matures and some bugs that will be found will be fixed. It looks like really good software but the best thing to do right now is to wait.
-Tony
