Magento 2 and What it Means for You
As Magento 2.0 was released this week for public consumption, we’ve been getting our ducks in a row to help our clients determine whether or not this upgrade makes sense for them. This is a significant release for the Magento ecosystem and one of the features that most catches our eye is the more modular codebase. With our focus on support, upgrades and maintenance, this helps us to better ensure that one update, fix or change is less likely to impact other parts of the site. This also extends to upgrades and patches… which, if you’re already on Magento, you know have been fairly frequent this past year. We’re also super stoked about the pre-integration with Varnish.
Here are a few of 2.0’s other features, taken directly from the Magento site:
Open, Flexible Architecture
Underpinning these new releases is a next-generation architecture that offers unmatched flexibility to bring your commerce vision to life. It features a modular code base that enables easier customization, faster time-to-market, and greater deployment flexibility to public or private cloud environments. More extensive and efficient APIs allow you to connect and operate at scale with any third party solution, and theming capabilities make building site variations for new product lines or geographies easier than ever. A wide range of turnkey extensions also enable fast and affordable enhancements to your store.
Engaging Shopping Experiences
Creating engaging, seamless and personalized customer experiences across any device is central to the Magento 2.0 platform. New responsive design reference themes give you a fast way to create sites that supports anytime, anywhere sales. And you can share your products in a more immersive way through integrated video. An all-new checkout is easier to customize and further improves conversion rates by minimizing steps and required information. You can also offer convenient, one-click account creation to save customer profiles for future purchases.
Enhanced Business Agility and Productivity
Magento Commerce is also revolutionizing the merchant experience, enabling you to operate more efficiently and handle rapid growth, without scaling up your team. The new Admin panel design offers a streamlined, consumer-like interface that saves time when managing day-to-day tasks and is intuitive for new team members to learn. It is also touch-friendly so you can make updates or track sales while on-the-go. Improved business tools empower you to continuously optimize your operations to drive growth. You can now effortlessly customize and save views in the Admin panel to enable quick access to information critical to your business. Setting up new products is also faster, with a step-by-step product creation tool and product import capabilities that are 4x faster than before.
Enterprise-grade Scalability and Performance
The Magento platform has been supercharged to offer over 50% faster page load times across many catalog and checkout pages to help you delight your customers and improve conversion rates. It pre-integrates Apache Varnish to cache page content for faster performance and optimizes code and images for fast loading. Your team will be delighted too, with improved Admin performance and support for more concurrent updates. Magento Enterprise Edition 2.0 also delivers enterprise-grade scalability and high availability with standalone master databases for key subsystems along with multiple slave databases.
Secure Payments
Additionally, the Magento platform comes with tight out-of-the-box integrations with PayPal, Braintree, and Authorize.net payment gateways. Magento Enterprise Edition 2.0 also integrates with WorldPay and CyberSource. All versions provide improved security and the ability to pursue the easiest level of PCI compliance, depending on the selected payment method.