New Important Features of Magento 2 You Should Pay Attention

Hi guys,

Responding to our expectation of a new Magento version, Ebay has released Magento 2.0 beta in December 2014, which promises the next evolution of Magento. Coming from the feedbacks of developers to solution partners, industry partners and merchants, Magento 2 will focus on:

+ Making Magento easy to deploy, maintain and scale.
+ Enabling extension and applications to be implemented, tested and maintained easily.
+ Simplifying customizations and making it easy for clients to achieve upgrades.

By achieving these goals, Magento 2 will be the most flexible, scalable, modern and open eCommerce platform in the world.

In this blog post, I would like to share with you all remarkable new features of Magento 2 that you should pay great attention to.

1. Compatibility with most poplular platforms

Comparing to Magento 1.x, Magento 2.0 is more superior in terms of compatibility with many popular platform. Except for PHP 5.3 and Zend FrameWork, it also supports MSSQL, Oracle and a wide range of many other databases.

2. New Structure

File structure in Magento 2 witnesses 2 major changes. The first one is that everything is put under the app structure. The second is you can access template, layout, jss, and css/less files of any particular module in its own VIEW directory. This is a great help for module developers as they can do customizations without changing core site functionality.

4 types of directories in Magento 2 file system: 

+ Primary directories
+ System directories
+ Application directories
+ Public directories 

The “public directory” is newly introduced with the aim to provide a better clear view structure for developers.

3. New Layout Elements

Instead of a core/text_list block type serving as a structural block in Magento 1.x, Magento 2 creates a totally new concept of container wrapper for this purpose. Blocks, other containers are contained in a container. Moreover, a container can render all children.

4.  CSS Preprocessing

Instead of using Bootstrap, Magento 2 use LESS and CSS in the theme core. Using LESS and CSS has great advantages as follows:

+ LESS enables users to custom theme easier and faster.
+ LESS preprocessor & CSS URL resolver help speed up page load, enhance performance and make the system more friendly with the search engine. 

5. A tesing friendly

Magento 2.0 allows developer to setup automated test easily. This Magento version is equipped with a flawless testing framework performing numerous tests including: Unit Tests, Static Tests, Integration Tests, Legacy and Migration Tests, JavaScript Unit Tests and Performance Tests.

6. Scalability and performance Improvement

Magento 2.0 improves scalability consisting of indexers, new Magento performance toolkit, Varnish Cache. The new indexers in Magento 2.0 have more effective updates to speed up performance, and Magento performance toolkits help to verify and optimize system performance.  Varnish Cache helps reducing server load and speed up the page load.

7. JQuery Library

In order to use JavaScript Library, Jquery is the most popular lightweight. In magento 2.0, prototype is replaced by Jquery as the default JavaScript library, which is one of the most important changes. However, prototype is still included with Magento 2.

Magento 2.0 supports one Javascript framework only, which means that there will be less Javascript conflicts in 2.0 than in 1.x.

 In short, Magento 2.0 version definitely brings the most modern, flexible, and scalable ecommerce platform that is really worth an appreciation.