Magento has recently released their latest version, 2.2.6, and we thought we’d share our views on it. According to their release notes
“This release includes 25 critical enhancements to product security, over 150 core code fixes and enhancements, and over 350 community-submitted pull requests.”
But what does that mean for me?
Well, being a techie or not, we can be certain of one thing. This is undoubtedly one of their biggest releases in the series. The key words to note here are,
- Security
- Code fixes
- Enhancement
Security
“Sec-UR-rity – You are at the center!”
Whether you own an existing E-commerce website, or planning to start an E-commerce venture, or you are an E-commerce developer. One thing I’m sure all of you will agree on is that security is pretty damn important.
With 25+ patches aimed specifically at fixing critical XSS, CSRF, and RCE vulnerabilities, Magento 2.2.6 is sure to give the hackers a tough time!
Comparing with other players in the same domain, we can be certain of one thing, Magento overpowers its competitors in the security department. But with great power comes great responsibility. With every new security release, hackers gain more knowledge about where the system was lagging (and was fixed in the next version). So, if you don’t keep your website updated at all times, you might be the next target. But before you start running for your panic room, consider this. Magento is not only secure, to begin with, but also keeps on releasing new security patches regularly, which doesn’t require a PhD in rocket science to install either. A composer-friendly-architecture ensures that updating the Magento system is as hassle-free as possible.
Code Fixes
“Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.”
In addition to the 25+ security fixes, a lot of code fixes and cleanups also occurred in this release ensuring your system runs smooth as a door knob. Some of the highlights are,
- Substantial improvements to performance – With certain CLI command execution time reduced by 90% and average re-indexing time reduced by up to 80%, and also using multithreading, a concept still pretty new in the PHP community. In addition to that, merchants can now improve the store performance by disabling Magento Report functionality.
- Improvements to the reliability and ease of the checkout process – The speed at which Magento places an order is no longer dependent on how many shipping/payment methods your website has. Previously with a larger number of shipping methods active, Magento sometimes took up to 20 seconds to place an order.
- Zero-downtime deployment – For businesses having a greater amount of product, customer, or order data, a big hassle is to update their catalog, since it might result in the website being “down” for quite some time, which in turn affects traffic at your site. Magento now uses a “connection holding” capability, which ensures a smoother customer experience, as there will not be any site unavailability, even during deployment involving complicated schema changes.
- Magento Shipping – The two main features introduced in this module are Click & Collect, and Batch Processing. The click & collect feature allows merchants to enable the customers to directly collect shipments from certain source locations/stores (which can be configured by the merchant). And batch processing, as the name suggests, allows merchants to book shipments for a batch of orders, and modify/specify experiences for orders assigned to a batch (which is pretty useful if the number of orders you’re getting is a lot).
Enhancements
“If at first you don’t succeed; call it version 1.0.”
It’s a known fact that Magento, being open source, has a pretty good community and equally potent contributors. Magento officially, as well as unofficially organises various contribution events, during which, we, the Magento developers, try to fix certain known issues with the system, as a way of giving back to the community.
This release features over 350 community-submitted enhancements, ranging from catalog improvements to cart and checkout optimizations.
To view the complete Release Notes, you could refer the below link – Magento Commerce 2.2.6 Release Notes
So is it worth upgrading?
It is officially announced that support for Magento 1.x will be ending by June 2020. This means bug fixes, security patches and performance upgrades will not be delivered for any of the Magento 1.x versions. In simple words, if your website runs on 1.x after June 2020, it can be a potential target for hackers. Plenty of essential features that are missing in 1.x versions are made available in Magento 2.x versions, in addition to that, Magento will also continue to roll out new features. Considering the features and advancements of Magento 2.x, it is a wise decision to migrate to Magento 2.x.
Taking into account the focus and updates given by Magento targeting 2.x versions, it seems like Magento 2.x is here to stay. Magento 2.2.6 is one of the biggest updates so far, and it is highly recommended for business below 2.2.6 to update to this latest version.
However, make sure the migration process is left in the hands of experts to ensure safe, complete and quick transmission.
