With the news that the Magento 2 developer beta had been released, we got to work testing it for addition to our high-performance Magento hosting platform. We’re happy to announce that in the very near future, we’ll be adding Magento 2.0 to our eCommerce hosting plans. It’s been a long time coming, but once you see the new and improved Magento, we’re sure you’ll agree that it was worth the wait.
Magento 2.0 will be a significant and comprehensive upgrade, with innumerable new features both in the user-facing parts of Magento and under-the-hood. There’s good news for eCommerce retailers and Magento developers alike.
The Magento team have been focused on seven major areas for improvement, but I’d like to introduce you to Magento 2.0 by focusing on the three areas that will have most impact on our hosting clients.
- Performance — Magento will be faster than ever. The application’s indexers have been considerably improved to deliver faster query performance and increased efficiency for updates. Static pages get full-page caching, which has the potential to significantly improve performance on some pages, and Magento 2.0 will include out-of-the-box support for integration with Varnish. Additionally, the Magento performance toolkit will provide a set of test scripts that can be used to verify system performance.
- Comprehensive technology stack upgrade — Magento can still go toe-to-toe with its more youthful peers, but its technology stack was getting a little long in the tooth. Magento 2.0 includes some of the shiniest cutting-edge web technologies: JQuery, HTML5, CSS3, and RequireJS are all baked in, and Magento 2.0 works great with PHP 5.5 and MySQL 5.6, which bring improvements in scaling and efficiency. Magento 2.0 also includes built-in support for CSS preprocessing with LESS, which will streamline theme development workflows.
- And speaking of themes — Magento 2.0 makes front-end development much more straightforward. Business logic has been separated from the frontend, freeing developers to make changes to the interface without having to worry about underlying functionality. Additionally, Magento 2.0 will include a blank theme to get developers started and will make available a UI/Pattern library that should allow developers to create and modify themes much more quickly.
Magento 2.0 is a welcome update, and it addresses many of the issues that have bothered Magento users for the past few years. We’re looking forward to integrating Magento 2.0 with our advanced Secure Isolated Platform and bringing all the new goodness to our clients.
If you want to keep up with the progress of our Magento 2.0 hosting plans, keep an eye on this blog or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus.