Magento 2 launches

Last month Magento announced the biggest shake-up of their software to date with the launch of Magento 2, promising greater flexibility, improved performance, and new responsive design themes.

All these shiny features make it tempting to jump straight in, however, there will inevitably be some kinks to work through, so I tend to hold off from installing the new versions with clients for 6 months or so to allow the team time to have things running smoothly. Whilst they’re hard at work fine-tuning the system, let’s have a closer look at some of the most exciting changes.

Magento 2 comes in two flavours, Enterprise and Community, that sound somewhat Star Trek-y in name. The headline grabbing change is the introduction of full page caching within the Community edition. This should mean pages load much faster as less disk reads are needed from the server. Magento 2 also offers full integration with the leading http accelerator, Varnish 4, taking page loads times into hyperspace.

Ecommerce has also been refined with a more customisable checkout process which can help to streamline the purchase process for customers. Both platforms offer tight integration with PayPal, Braintree, and Authorize.net payment gateways whilst the Enterprise edition can also integrate with WorldPay and CyberSource. Magento 2 continues to provide excellent security for your e-commerce site, as well as easily allowing you to achieve PCI compliance.

In keeping with the on-the-go nature of the modern world, the Magento 2 admin panel has not only been revamped to offer a more attractive, easy to use interface, but is also touch friendly, allowing you to make changes at any time on your phone or tablet.

If you require any more information on this new version, or would like to enquire about website maintenance packages, do get in touch with me at ideas@steveperrycreative.com or call on +44 (0)7773 429068.