Magento 2.0 Release: What Has Been Improved

The largest gift-giving winter holidays started earlier last year. At least for the Magento community. After many months of configuration and development, the Magento 2.0 release has seen the light of day. November 17, 2015, was marked in the calendar of Magento team members as the day when their efforts to improve the architecture, modularity, and scalability of the platform were rewarded as expectations of the Magento community.

Magento has long been acknowledged as the best e-commerce platform for those in search of the most viable sales solution. Being a sales-friendly platform it provides for compatibility with different payment systems and multiple delivery options. What is more, it doesn’t stop there but goes further beyond. Sending newsletters from the admin panel and offering wish lists to customers opens a gateway to marketing.

However, there is a rub that comes with the functionalities of Magento versions. Magento Community is free as opposed to Magento Enterprise edition and therefore less advanced. Key differences between these two Magento versions depreciate the significance of Magento Community free deployment. Magento Enterprise comes out top re-indexing about 80% faster, handling large catalogs, offering robust backup features, marketing segmentation functionality, a solid RMA system, auto-generated coupons, and more advanced search options. For quite a while Magento has been priding itself on all key attributes of the best e-commerce solution.

Magento 2 release candidate has retained its winning features, which are:

• open source platform (open code gives wide room for improvement and manipulation);
• a less advanced Magento Community version can be chosen and upgraded to fit your project needs;
• updated out-of-the-box online store;
• flexible and powerful admin panel;
• a variety of free and paid modules.

Not bad, really. Of course, standing still is not as bad as heading in the wrong direction especially when the position is solid. However, Magento team leaders willing to remain at the leading edge of technology with their e-commerce platform released Magento 2 with improvements for public assessment.

Let’s just quickly run the path of Magento 2 improvements:

• vastly improved architecture with remarkable new features which now enhance Magento Community Edition, not just the Enterprise Edition;
• among other key Magento 2.0 advantages refactoring of classes “observers” stands out;
• Magento 2 improvements in searching the catalog;
• optimization of the initialization process;
• optimization of store data download;
• Magento 2 release is compatible with HHVM and PHP 7;
• enhanced frontend and admin panel are also among Magento 2.0 advantages;
• improvements in JavaScript components;
• rapidly auto-generated API documentation;
• a large number of Magento 2 improvements are associated with the component «data grid»;
• enlarged product catalog with new features in configured products and improved image generator;
• users are notified of product info changes which is another obvious Magento 2.0 advantage;
• wider payment options ( eWay payment gateway, PayPal Express Checkout, Braintree), and improved design of the payment form.

This one is just a concise version of a far more detailed write-up with more than two dozen items of Magento 2.0 advantages, improvements, and changes in CMS, WebApi, during the initial installation of Magento, Sample data, and other components. Magento 2.0 enhancements have been remarkable in all areas: architecture, performance, and manageability transforming this e-commerce platform into an even more robust, reliable, and flexible e-commerce platform with a focus on scalability and modularity. Enjoy the Magento 2 release!

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