Yay! After bajillion hours of work and thousands lines of written code, the Magento 2.0 Release Candidate has been officially published on GitHub!
Along with impressive number of extensions and add-ons, the first version of well-known eCommerce platform had a comprehensive set of standard functions to offer, so the work on Magento 2 suggested that quite high standards had to be exceeded. But in a constantly changing tech world nothing lasts forever, therefore, we’re glad to welcome a long-awaited new version of Magento with its sophisticated design and advanced capabilities.
Basically, all the changes in the new version of Magento have been made in almost every section of the platform, ensuring that all stores running on Magento will keep offering high-quality service to the eCommerce world. Let’s check out major improvements made by Magento developers in order to preserve the leading position on the market.
User-friendly Approach
One of the most obvious and remarkable changes made to the second edition of Magento is its brand new admin panel. Due to its discreet design, vertical navigation and less usage of orange color it now seems that you use a completely different system with most of the old good functionality we all got used to. Moreover, this enhanced user interface is mobile-friendly, ensuring easier control and configuration of the online store from wherever the admin is.
Trendy Technologies
To establish seamless and uninterrupted operation of Magento online stores, a new state-of-the-art edition of the platform is supposed to be based on reliable technologies, so Magento 2 adopted the updated technology stack with default HTML5/CSS3 setup and PHP 5 as a minimum requirement.
Performance Enhancement
As rather slow performance was one of the burning issues common for websites running on Magento, the focus was set on its improvement, which included store initialization, data loading optimization, refactoring the observer classes, catalog search enhancement and optimizing Magento framework based on various requirements.
Payment Methods
For the safe and secure payment operations via Magento, its team made an effort to upgrade PayPal and Braintree payment methods and implemented eWay gateway.
Product Section
No matter how fancy the web store looks or how fast it works, client’s core interest is still a product he came there for. For this reason, a number of improvements have been made to the Product section, providing expanded set of options for their configuration. For example, the list of product variations can now be managed through the wizard or manually or by removing and adding the attributes. Also, some new options of user notifications have been added upon product update. Besides, to save admin’s time and nerves, product data can also be updated by mass actions.
Framework Improvements
The new version of the platform is really tuned according to community recommendations, so Magento Framework has been updated with following essential requirements:
- Major code refactoring took place to get rid of all the mess in the system
- Major Data Grid enhancement
- Modules can now be enabled/disabled for Magento application
- Compatibility with HHVM and PHP 7
To see the full list of changes made in Magento 2 RC, take a look at its detailed Changelog on GitHub.
