Magento Community Edition 2.0 launch
Highlights
The flexible architecture supporting innovation and fast time to market
- Modern tech stack based on popular, innovative PHP frameworks and coding patterns that are efficient for developers to use
- The modular code base for making fine-grain customizations and easily adding or removing functionality to meet merchant needs
- Service contracts that provide stable interfaces to business logic to help simplify code customization and ensure smooth upgrades
- Modern theming and layout framework to quickly create and maintain site variations for seasonal campaigns, new product lines, and market expansions
- Extensive and efficient APIs, including new ones for promotions and taxes, to connect and operate at scale with any third-party solution
- Automated testing to improve code quality and speed up the QA process for a faster time to market
- Easy upgrades so merchants can quickly add new functionality as it becomes available through quarterly releases
Enterprise-level scalability and performance
Performance
- Client-side optimizations, such as minimizing and bundling JavaScript, compressing images, and improving the use of browser caching for static content, increase page load times.
- Server-side improvements, such as integrating Apache Varnish caching, enable faster performance out-of-the-box with minimal tuning.
Scalability
- Standalone databases for key subsystems like order management, product management, and checkout; combined with support for MySQL Cluster, enable Magento to scale to handle rapid growth.
- Comprehensive backend improvements enable larger teams to make product updates and process orders at the same time without diminished performance.
Intuitive Admin and efficient business user tools
- The modern Magento Admin user interface is intuitive and easy for new team members to learn, and allows users to efficiently monitor business performance and manage daily tasks.
- The Magento Admin is designed to be touch-friendly, so you can manage your store while on the go.
- The ability to effortlessly customize and save different Admin panel views saves time when managing products, analyzing customer data, and processing orders.
- Setting up products is faster with a new step-by-step product creation tool and improved product data import capabilities that are 4x faster than before.
New shopper experience features to improve engagement, conversion rates, and sales
- The new checkout flow speeds shoppers through the process by minimizing steps and required information.
- It defaults to guest checkout but automatically recognizes existing registered customers based on their email addresses and gives them the option to check out faster with their saved profile information.
- Shoppers can conveniently create an account with one click from the order Thank You page, enabling merchants to encourage customer registrations without interrupting the checkout process.
- A detailed order summary with product images encourages shoppers to complete checkout by providing a fast and clear way to see what is in their shopping cart.
- Magento integrates with key payment gateways such as PayPal, Braintree, Authorize.Net, WorldPay (EE only), and CyberSource (EE only) out-of-the-box and allows payment information to be directly passed from the client's browser to the payment gateway to improve security and enable the easiest level of PCI compliance (depending on the selected payment method).
- The included Blank and Luma themes allow merchants to create engaging, seamless and SEO-friendly shopping experiences in half the time.