Magento 2 - Online Shop
Magento 2 is more than just a further development of the successful eCommerce system Magento 1. Rather, the Magento developer community has created a completely new platform for selling products of any kind.
Magento 2 delivers a number of interesting features and new technologies for online store operators and for their customers. Magento is available in both the commercial AdobeCommerce version, distributed by Adobe, and the free Magento Open Source version.
The latest version of Magento 2 runs under the version number Magento2.4.3and offers the features listed below.
Magento 2 Extensions, Modules and Extensions
Magento 2 already comes with a solid basic set of functions for operating an online store in its basic installation.
If you want to expand your online store, add functions or modules, or even implement completely different, new applications, you can currently (as of 09/2021) access around 6,000 extensions via the Magento Marketplace.
Nearly 10,000 additional extensions and developments are also available free of charge on the code hosting platform Github.
Performance improvements
With Magento 2, control mechanisms were also established, which make it possible to also make customer-specific content cacheable via the control of the browser on the part of Magento. Private Content represents the concept for this. Magento 2.4.3 includes improvements that shorten indexing time for product price and catalog rule indexers. Merchants can now exclude a site from a customer group or shared catalog, reducing the number of records to be indexed and shortening indexing times.
Advanced Content Management the Page Builder
Until now, Page Builder was reserved for Magento Enterprise or the commercial Adobe Commerce versions, but it is also available free of charge in the Magento Open Source variant.
Page Builder is available as an extension bundle for Magento Open Source and can be optionally integrated if required Once integrated, Page Builder replaces Magento's rich text editor and is available as a new standard tool for editing content of any kind.
The Page Builder can replace the Content Editor in the following admin areas:
- CMS pages
- CMS bucks
- Category description
- Product description
All content created with the previous editor can be migrated to the Page Builder. In addition, a variety of sample content and modules can be downloaded to the Page Builder. Thus, banners, forms, various buttons and call-to-action, column layouts, up to lazyloading or slider are available here free of charge.
By the way, the Magento Page Builder is directly compatible with the Hyvä theme.
Shopping cart, checkout and catalog updates
- Magento now takes country-specific decimal locators into account when converting and updating the product quantity in the cart.
- Buyers are now redirected to the cart page instead of the product page when they try to update the mini cart for an order with deleted items. Previously, buyers were redirected to the product page.
- Buyers can now add a product to their cart with a minimum advertised price(MAP) that exceeds the regular product price.
- Buyers can now successfully change their billing address through the checkout workflow when checking out with multiple addresses.
- Custom design layout updates are now applied as expected; previously, custom design layout updates were ignored.
- The Advanced Pricing customer group price block price input field now has a minimum width of five digits. Previously, only two icons were visible in this field on low-resolution displays.
- Magento now successfully deletes a product media image after deleting a product. Previously, the product media image remained in the folder after successfully deleting the product.
Bug fixes
With Magento 2.4.3, over 370 new fixes have been made to the core code. It includes the resolution of nearly 290 GitHub issues by community members. These community contributions range from minor cleanups to the core code. Here they come to thebug fixes in the Magento 2.4 release notes.
Magento 2.4.2 - Performance improvements and bug fixes
Several scalability improvements enable Magento 2.4.2 to natively support complex catalogs up to 20 times larger than in previous versions.
This release includes over 280 new fixes to the core code and 35 security improvements. It includes the resolution of nearly 290 GitHub issues by community members. Click here to see the bug fixes in the Magento 2.4.2 release notes.
Magento 2.4.1 - Performance improvements and bug fixes
Reduction in the size of network transfers between Redis and Magento. The resulting performance improvements include a reduction in the size of the network cache and execution time for many scenarios.
Improved message queue performance. Three new configuration settings enable a reduction in CPU consumption of consumer queues. These optional parameters provide better control over consumers and save server resources.
This release includes all the core quality improvements that were included in Magento 2.4.0, over 150 new fixes to the core code, and over 15 security improvements. It includes the resolution of almost 300 GitHub issues by community members. Click here to see the bug fixes in the Magento 2.4.1 release notes.
Bug fixes
This release includes all the core quality improvements that were included in Magento 2.4.0, over 150 new fixes to the core code and over 15 security improvements. It includes the resolution of almost 300 GitHub issues by community members. Click here to see the bug fixes in the Magento 2.4.1 release notes.
Platform upgrades and adjustments
Magento is known for integrating and supporting various third-party platforms, payment providers and other standard components out of the box. These modules are also updated as part of the regular system upgrades. In Magento 2.4.3, the following platforms have been updated as listed below:
(Magento 2.4.3 is not yet compatible with PHP 8.x, but the following platform upgrades bring us closer to future compatibility with PHP 8.x).
Core Composer dependencies and third-partylibraries have been updated to the latest versions compatible with PHP 8.x.
KnockoutJS library has been updated to v3.5.1 (the latest version).
Magento Open Source 2.4.3 has been tested and confirmed as compatible with Redis 6.0.12 . (Magento 2.4.x remains compatible with Redis 5.x ).
- Laminas library dependencies have been updated to PHP 8.x compatible versions. Some redundant dependencies have been removed from the composer.json file.Magento Open Source 2.4.3 uses Laminas 3.4.0
Other Changes
- This release includes Adobe Stock integration v2.1.1.
- PayPal Pay Later is now supported in deployments that include PayPal. This feature allows buyers to pay for an order in bi-weekly installments instead of paying the full amount at the time of purchase.
- Authorize.Net integration removed from core code - extension available in Commerce Marketplace