Magento 2.0 Developmental Phase is Here

Magento 

Magento has become nearly synonymous with eCommerce. Over the last 5 years “Magento” has been searched on Google more often than “eCommerce” demonstrating supreme dominance of its market. Magento 2.0 promises to be the biggest upgrade yet, offering significant advancements in customization and performance to the world’s largest eCommerce platform. Magento currently accounts for 30% of eCommerce sites globally and with a 2.0 release date aiming for the end of 2015 that number is only poised to grow.

(Based on an October 28 Blog Post from aheadworks.com)

 Magento’s most recent upgrades to its Community and Enterprise Editions are full of useful improvements and 2.0 will take these advancements to a new level. Magento’s Community Edition incorporates many similar updates as its more advanced Enterprise Edition counterpart. Many of these features revolve around increased accessibility and performance, underlining why Magento has become so popular for online retailers of all sizes. Released in November, the most recent Magento upgrade includes updates allowing for many web responsive design features right out of the box, eliminating the need for costly or time consuming extensions.

Here are some of the additions offered on Enterprise Edition 1.14.1

Drag-and-drop visual merchandizing tool-The most impressive and immediately noticeable upgrade feature allows retailers to arrange and organize products on category pages with greater ease than ever before. It conveniently allows vendors to increase their merchandizing capabilities right out of the box. The drag-and-drop tool allows for the adjustment of products on category pages to be arranged and previewed before being posted live allowing merchants to test and find the preferred view for their products. These changes can then be updated in real time. The visual merchandizing tool is also a fantastic time saver when it comes to establishing or updating product categories. Products can now be added or removed in bulk, and rules can be established to have new products automatically assigned to their respective categories. Other features within the merchandizing tool include the ability to create dynamic category groups. This allows for specific categories such as “new products” or “on sale items” to be added easily and quickly by pulling products from other categories based on certain product attributes.

Swatch Capabilities- Merchants can now further enhance product information with the “swatch” feature that allows for a full range of product attributes to be shown such as product sizes, colors and fabrics that will help further enhance product descriptions and help increase conversion rates.
Responsive Design Themes and E-mail Templates- The new responsive design reference themes offer multiple features including: add-to-cart by SKU, private sales, downloadable products and even gift registries. The responsive default email templates allow emails and newsletters to be read from any device. This is notably important as the vast majority of smart phone users rely on their mobile phones to check their email on an as needed basis.
Increased Speed and Security- The addition of PHP 5.5 will increase security and allow access to code updates, while MySQL 5.6 will improve site speed and scalability and also reduce memory usage on the database server and improve debugging features.
Increased Analytics- Magento now supports Universal Analytics, the most advanced standard for Google Analytics. This allows for merchants to increase the customization and metrics for tracking, while also analyzing offline and mobile app activity. They will also have access to updates that are only available through Universal Analytics.

Magento Community Edition 1.9.1

The newest version of Magento’s Community Edition was released at the end of November, a couple of weeks after the Enterprise Edition release. Many of the updated features are incorporated into both editions, with the main exception being the drag-and-drop merchandizing tool, which is currently only available out of the box with the Enterprise Edition. Besides, the main upgrade features mentioned above, the Community Edition also boasts more than 70 improvements that can be viewed in the Magento release notes

Magento 2.0

While the most recent updates to Magento’s Enterprise and Community Editions both enhance the platform’s capabilities, the advancements for version 2.0 offer to bring Magento a whole level higher. Magento 2 is designed to integrate more efficiently with third party solutions, while also being more accessible to frontend developers. Magento 2 offers simplified upgrades and faster deployments all aimed at increasing the efficiency of the world’s number one eCommerce platform. The final release date is still nearly a year away and many improvements will be added and enhanced in that time frame, yet Magento still has seven key goals that will provide the foundation for the new version.
Technology Stack- Magento 2 will feature the newest technologies available in order to help developers maximize their Magento operations. This includes jQuery, HTML5, CSS3 and the latest versions of PHP and MySQL, among others.
Enhanced Customization Process- This includes improving the Magento search feature, simplifying integration with external systems through improved APIs, XML validation to make it easier for developers to use and configure XML and modular code, which serves to help increase user control and customization.
Front End Accessibility- An important and highly touted feature of Magento 2 is the increased accessibility for developers. There are multiple features to enhance this accessibility including the newest HTML 5 themes and the ability to support LESS CSS preprocessing right out of the box using Magento code, which also serves to speed up front-end development. There is also the introduction of Magento UI Library allowing for customization of nearly all front- end elements along with increasing the speed for customizing or modifying any new theme.
Increased Efficiency for Upgrades- Magento 2 has simplified the installation process for not just Magento itself, but also new and upgraded extensions. It will be easier than ever to upgrade software and extensions. Upgrading to Magento 2 will also be easier by allowing for the exportation of all records with a standard theme. Customized themes are the exception and will need to be re-done.
Enhanced Scalability and Performance- Overall speed will be increased for nearly all aspects including updates and page loading time. Full page caching will help erase the need for additional servers. Improvements to the admin site will allow multiple admin users to make necessary changes and updates to their product lists.
Improved Code Base Quality- Magento 2 offers an enhanced testing framework to significantly reduce manual testing. Published documentation will be increased on many topics including CSS, RWD and information on the new UI Library only available for Magento 2. These increased guides will help developers maximize efficiency in learning the new features Magento 2 has to offer.
The Magento Community- Increased updates to Github promise to offer more feedback from Magento users and developers helping to increase the quality of Magento 2 and the features and updates it will offer in the future.

Magento 2.0 Demo