All of The Release Highlights from the Magento 2 Launch!

The wait is over! We’ve been waiting years to say this; Magento 2 is generally available to the market as of today.

This is a pretty significant release for Magento and their giant ecosystem of merchants, partners, and developers. Not to mention we’ve been waiting for years to make this announcement!

Our team at Demac Media have been going through Magento 2 training over the past few months, and there have been a number of amazing features that have really caught our attention. Today we’d like to quickly share those features with you, including:

• Pricing Model and Licensing Changes
• Roadmap for Better Planning
• Upgrade with Ease
• Performance and Scalability – Community Edition and Enterprise Edition
• Modern Technology Stack and Modular Application Architecture
• New and Improved Admin User Interface
• and more to come!

Pricing Model and Licensing Changes (with Cloud Support!)

Magento will be adopting a per-business licensing model (instead of “per server”), meaning merchants can build out any type of infrastructure they’d like in their deployment of Magento. If you’d like to host Magento in the cloud, and automatically scale up servers based on peak user demand, knock yourself out! If you want dedicated hardware, no problem.

Going forward, your Magento license will be aligned with your gross merchandise sales volume handled by Magento.

Published Magento Roadmap for Better Planning

Merchant benefit: The value of a strong roadmap can’t be understated. Knowing what’s coming lets you plan your investments in improving upon the Magento platform by seeing exactly where Magento is going to be advancing features forward. In other words, you likely won’t have to worry about building (and paying for) features that are already on the roadmap!

Magento is moving forward with a quarter-by-quarter roadmap, starting in 2016. Historically, Magento has kept their roadmap fairly closed off and it’s great to see them commit to a regular release schedule with more transparency around their planned innovations for the platform.

Some of the big features we know about that are on deck for 2016:

• Elasticsearch support
• Content staging
• B2B specific enhancements
• Personalization capabilities
• Enhanced analytics capabilities
• and much, much more.

Upgrade with Ease

Merchant benefit: Reducing the cost of upgrades and patches means you have more budget to spend on innovation.

When you own an innovation platform, it’s your responsibility to stay up-to-date with platform improvements over time. Magento 2 is going to make this investment much smaller for merchants by making upgrades easier.

For solution partners and technology providers, this means we get to focus on adding greater value through our own R&D investments into the Magento ecosystem.

Performance and Scalability: Community Edition and Enterprise Edition

Magento 2 Community Edition will come out of the box with caching capabilities and optimized indexing/partial indexing that have historically been limited to Magento Enterprise Edition, putting both on par for performance.

Magento 2 Enterprise Edition will have the added ability to split out multiple master/slave databases based on functional area of the application for those merchants looking to achieve giant scale with the platform. You can now have a separate database for things like the checkout, order management and product catalog management.

Modern Technology Stack and Modular Application Architecture

Merchant Benefit: Magento 2 will give you the ability to customize parts of the application without worrying about impacting other parts. For example, making improvements to your product catalog will have absolutely no impact on your checkout and vice versa.

With a far more modular code base in Magento 2, we are now presented with even more options in the methodologies and processes we use for implementing Magento. As big believers in specialization (be great at a few things!), allowing our development teams to focus in on specific areas of the application and to go deep in their area of expertise is really exciting.

Magento is taking away some of the “plumbing” type work that systems integrators and hosting partners would have been taking on in the past. The formalization of their support for modern technologies will help merchants see efficiencies in the management and maintenance of production instances.

Here are the technologies supported in Magento 2:

• Varnish
• Nginx
• Knockout
• RabbitMQ
• PHPUnit
• JMeter
• Composer (for deployments)

New and Improved Admin User Interface

The new Admin user interface for Magento 2 is a modern beauty, adhering to what we think are current user experience standards. The admin is incredibly customizable for merchant users, with the ability to drag and drop grid columns for easier merchandising of product catalogs. This alone is worth the price of admission, especially for merchants with larger catalogs and multiple merchandisers on staff.

Some of the features we really love include:

• customizable / saveable views
• personalized back-end
• product creation wizard / interfaces

Magento 2 is going to make many lives easier by creating a far better user experience specifically for the product creation process.

What else can you expect?

If all of that isn’t enough, we’ve got a little list going of more things you can expect coverage on from our future Magento 2 blog posts.

• Enhanced API’s
  • Continued support for SOAP / REST
  • More coverage, much faster. What previously took 3 to 4 calls now takes 1.
• Extension Conflict Management
• Automated Testing
• Theming & Layout Enhancements
  • Out-of-the-box Magento 2 has 2 themes.
  • Multi-Level Theme Inheritance
  • Modular Code
• Checkout Improvements
  • Advanced Guest Checkout (automatic email detection)
  • Easily Customizable, which means easier to A/B test those customizations.
  • Designed to ask the fewest pieces of information of the customer. So this means detecting what we already have from that customers and getting them to “fill in the blanks”.

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