gomagentowebdevelopment-blog

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Magento migration – The complete guide

Magento has pressed the button on Magento 1 and will stop supporting Magento 1 by June 2020 for both enterprise and community edition.

It is a high time to migrate your store to Magento 2, although we understand that migration can be a nightmare for many retailers, our certified Magento 2 developers are here to make this transition easy for you.

Why do you need to migrate to Magento 2? Magento is currently powering 28% of sites on the internet, but still, Magento 1 has always been criticized by Magento development experts and critics due to the performance issues.

Magento 2 offers a massive upgrade over Magento 1 when it comes to performance. So it becomes essential for you to migrate to Magento 2.

What should be kept in mind before Magento migration?

Before you migrate your store to Magento 2, here are some aspects that need to be taken care of –

Perform a full backup of your Magento 1 store

Create a clone of your Magento 1 store. Never perform the migration on the live Magento store.

Analyze in the clone website as what needs to be kept and what are things that can be removed from the new Magento 2 store.

Perform a compatibility check on the existing theme, extensions to make sure that they are compatible with Magento 2.

Magento migration process

According to the official documentation by Magento, the migration process can be achieved in four different stages –

Theme Migration

Extension Migration

Customizations

Data Migrations

Testing, Testing, Testing

Theme migration

Magento 2 has introduced a lot of new technologies and methodologies to deliver an enhanced shopping experience to both merchants and the users. But the major problem is that you cannot directly migrate your theme from Magento 1 to Magento 2.

For Magento 2, the new theme needs to be created from scratch, keep in mind the user experience and responsive design.

You can also select some pre-built Magento 2 themes from the Magento 2 marketplace.

Magento extension migration

The major problem here is that the Magento 1 extension will not work on Magento 2 and even if you try to integrate Magento 1 extensions on Magento 2, you may experience compatibility issues with your new Magento 2 store.

The Magento community and developers are trying hard to make the process of porting Magento 1 extensions to Magento 2 an easy process but until then only install the relevant Magento 2 extensions from the Magento marketplace.

Customization In most of the case, the custom code used in Magento 1 is compatible with Magento 2, but it also needs to be taken into consideration that there are structural differences in both the platforms so there may be some additional work required.

Magento also offers a Code Migration Toolkit that makes the process of migrating custom code an easy process.

Data Migration The last step in the Magento migration process is to migrate your settings and data, which includes products, orders, store configurations, categories, settings, etc. to Magento 2.

Magento has provided the most feasible solution for Magento Migration in the form of Magento 2 Data Migration Tool.

This official tool by Magento easily migrates your store data and settings to Magento 2 using CLI commands. Data Migration Tools completely migrates the store data and settings from the Magento 1 database to Magento 2 database based on a set of rules defined within the XML file.

Here is the complete step by step guide for Data Migration –

Step 1 – Install the Data Migration Tool The best possible way to install the Data Migration tool is using the composer. Make sure that the version of Magento 2 matches the version of the Data Migration tool.

For example, if you are using Magento 2.3.1, then you need to install the Data Migration Tool version 2.3.1.

Now run the following command –

As we are using version 2.3.1, so the second command will look like –

As we are using version 2.3.1, so the second command will look like –

As soon as you hit enter, it will ask you to enter your developer authentication keys.

To get your authentication keys, sign in to your Magento Marketplace account. Now go to your profile and click on Access Keys located under My Products section.

As soon as you provide your developer authentication keys, the Data Migration Tool will get installed on your Magento 2 store.

Step 2 – Configuring Data Migration Tool

After the installation is finished, you can find your mapping and configuration files in the following directories –

<Magento 2 root dir>/vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/opensource-to-opensource/<Magento 1 version>

Rename config.xml.dist to config.xml. Next, you need to open the config.xml in any of the code editors and specify the following changes –

In the above code, <source> contains the database information of magento 1 and <destination> contains the relevant database information of Magento 2. Rename all the files (map.xml.dist, map-eav.xml.dist) to (map.xml, map-eav.xml).

<crypt_key> is the encryption key of Magento 1 store and it can be found in the <Magento 1 root dir>/app/etc/local.xml file, within the <key> tag.

After you have done all the changes, save the config.xml file.

After that, rename the files mentioned in the options tag in the below-mentioned location (remove .dist from the end and save).

For ex: <Magento 2 root dir>/vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/opensource-to-opensource/<Magento 1 version>/map.xml

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Magento 2.3 – Everything You Need To Know

During the Imagine 2018 conference back in April, Magento announced the release of Magento 2.3 by the end of 2018.

After much of a wait,

Magento

has released the Magento 2.3 on November 28, 2018.

It has been almost a year since the last major release of

Magento 2.2 but Magento 2.3

has brought a ton of new core features with a lot of smaller optimizations.

11 New Features Magento 2.3 Introduced

Magento 2.3 introduces tons of new core features such as –

Progressive Web App (PWA) Studio

GraphQL Support

Declarative DB Schema

Asynchronous and Bulk Web API

Elasticsearch

PHP 7.2 Support

Multi-Source Inventory (MSI)

WYSIWYG Upgrade

Page Builder

Cache-Management

Google reCAPTCHA and Two Factor Authentication

Let’s have a closer look at them.

Progressive Web Applications (PWA) Studio

What are Progressive Web Applications (PWA)?

Progressive Web Applications (PWA)

is the future of

web app development

. PWA with

Android

Instant Apps is the next advancement in web industry after Responsive Web Design.

Progressive Web Apps uses progressive enhancements that offers features similar to a

native mobile application

.

Progressive Web Apps

and Android Instant Apps combined together lets you create beautiful apps with material design and animations without the need of installing them on any device.

Have you ever encountered a popup while browsing a website on mobile device saying “ADD TO HOME SCREEN”? When you click on the button, the application installs itself in the background. Now that application shows in your app drawer and offers the experience of a native mobile application.

The app was downloaded from a web application without seeing the face of a Play Store or App Store. Isn’t it great!!!

These PWA apps offer offline access to the content without the need of an internet connection.

Magento PWA Studio

The Magento PWA Studio is a collection of tools that allows development, deployment, and maintenance of a PWA application on the top of Magento 2.

Magento PWA Studio contains modern libraries and tools such as –

PWA-buildpack – Collection of main development tools

peregrine – Collection of UI Components

PWAs are normally based on JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue.js, AngularJS for dealing with the frontend of the application; and communicate with Magento 2 by means of REST API. This methodology is otherwise called Headless Magento.

GraphQL capabilities are required with Magento PWA Studio which is only available in Magento 2.3 release.

GraphQL

What is GraphQL?

GraphQL is a query language for APIs. It is one of the modern technology to build and query API.

In simple words, GraphQL is a syntax that addresses how to ask for data from a server and helps in loading data to a client.

GraphQL Offers –

It gives a chance to the client to determine precisely what information it needs.

It makes easier to collect information from numerous sources.

It uses a type of system to describe data.

Magento GraphQL Support

One of the biggest moves in Magento 2.3 is the introduction of GraphQL API Language. GraphQL is more powerful, flexible and efficient than the REST API.

Magento 2.3 executes GraphQL as an elective API endpoint in addition to REST API and SOAP API.

GraphQL opens up data retrieval possibilities for PWAs by allowing to request precise information that you require. It means that you can get a smaller amount of data more efficiently with the lesser number of API requests.

It allows Magento PWA to be quick even on slow mobile network connections.

Declarative DB Schema

In the previous Magento version, altering schema of a Magento database can be accomplished using InstallSchema and UpgradeSchema classes.

However, Magento 2.3 implements it using declarative database schema. In Declarative Database Schema, instead of defining database structures and changes with install scripts, altering schema is accomplished using an XML file.

Magento converts the XML file into SQL queries and runs them.

The major advantage of using Declarative Database Schema is rollback support. Now you can easily rollback to a previous version of a module or functionality.

Declarative Database Schema also greatly simplifies the Magento installation and upgrade process.

Asynchronous API Requests

Asynchronous API enables Magento to process a large number of API requests asynchronously without waiting for server response.

Thus it offers a huge advantage over traditional API approach, where the client has to wait for a significant amount of time to get a response until all the requests have been processed.

The video demonstrates a demo of the working of asynchronous API over message queue.

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is an open-source, scalable, enterprise-level search engine built on Apache Lucene.

Elasticsearch offers powerful and fast searches and is commonly used for log analytics, business analytics, text-based searches and more.

With Magento 2.3, Elasticsearch is now available to Magento Open Source users while previously being exclusive to Magento Commerce.

Elasticsearch will offer merchants to integrate powerful search engine capabilities in their webshops.

Support for PHP 7.2

PHP 7.2 support has been added to Magento 2.3 thereby offering more stability, security and enhanced performance. As PHP 7.2 removed the support for PHP encryption module ‘mcrypt’, now Magento 2.3 has moved from mcrypt to libsodium for password hashing.

Multi-Source Inventory (MSI)

Another addition to Magento 2.3 is the Multi-Source Inventory (MSI).

Now merchants can manage their inventory without the need for third-party extensions.

MSI enables merchants to manage inventory from multiple locations by adding their physical warehouses in the Magento system.

Also, MSI improved the checkout performance by adding a reservation system to the checkout process. Now instead of decrementing the stock from the inventory at the time of the checkout process, it is reserved within the new table structure.

It helps the unnecessary database locking and also helps in keeping the inventory amount up-to-date during peak order times.

WYSIWYG Upgrade

Magento 2.3 has upgraded the TinyMCE editor from version 3 to version 4 introducing new enhancements. Widgets, Media Gallery are now implemented as plugins.

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Why Magento is best for your eCommerce store?

Magento is one of the most popular e‐commerce carts, which presently enjoys a market share of around 30 percent. In fact, it has recorded a 60 % higher growth in the year 2014 as compared to the year 2013.

Besides, it is a highly scalable, secure, and robust system known for its flexibility, functionality, and community support. And it is the biggest open source platform that has certified over 2,800 developers for Magento e-commerce Design and Development across the world. This makes Magento appropriate for all business regardless of their sizes.

- Why Magento is best for a rapidly growing online business?

Every business has unique needs. So in order to create the perfect online business store, you need an e-commerce platform that offers easy customization. This helps in maximizing sales and optimizing operations.

Magento is the most appropriate system in this case. The inbuilt extensions and plugins allow Magento designers to customize the store to be in line with your business goals. This means you can get web design of your choice and an easily accessible admin panel that offers flexibility and scalability for business growth.

- Magento features Magento has umpteen number of features that help in increasing sales, traffic, and customer engagement. Let us understand some of these features in detail–

- Shopping cart with secure payment gateway Magneto offers a full stack of e‐commerce features. It offers easy checkout for your customers, with or without the need of signing up. It also offers easy payment gateway integration. So your customers can choose a payment mode of their choice, including some of them, are Authorize.net, Amazon Payment, and PayPal, etc.

- Easy web design With Magento, you can easily design your website from scratch even if you don’t have much technical know‐how. There are a wide variety of themes available on the platform besides those from the third party providers. And theme integration is pretty simple. You can download themes from Magento as well as third-party vendors. Then you can choose one that works best for your business and install them through Magento connect.

- Own more than one online store Magento lets you own more than one online store using a single Magento account. This means if you have different kinds of products, you can have one store for each kind of product, which can be controlled through a single admin panel.

- Appropriate for mobile devices For a business to be successful today, you must have a responsive online store that works equally well on web and mobile. Why? In 2015, 53% of users will be accessing the internet through their phone and this is expected to grow to 63% by 2017. So if your online store is not mobile friendly, you will end up losing a big number of prospective customers.

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Magento Functional Testing Framework (MFTF) July 30, 2019

Magento Functional Testing Framework (MFTF)

July 30, 2019

For any Magento store owner, it has become very competitive to survive in the retail ecosystem. So it is very much important to do continuous monitoring of your market and make changes in your Magento website.

These changes allow companies to quickly respond to the changing retail ecosystem. But while making any changes to your eCommerce store, it becomes important to ensure smooth user experience.

To achieve this, a thorough Magento testing needs to be followed involving user behavior simulation for proper performance evaluation. If the changes are very frequent, then the old manual testing techniques become redundant. To overcome this scenario, Magento has introduced Magento Functional Testing Framework (MFTF).

Magento Functional Testing Framework (MFTF) was introduced by Tom Erskine at Mage Test Fest. MFTF has already seen 2 major releases and the latest version available till today is 2.3.12.

Before, getting to know about the MFTF (Magento functional Testing framework), we should be aware of the Functional Testing framework.

   What is Functional Testing Framework(FTF)?

FTF is an open-source cross-platform solution where we can develop functional tests for a Magento application. These tests can be performed at any time with the options of –

Running a single test independently

Running multiple tests together as a test suite

Running all available tests in one-go

Tests usually cover the functionality of a business entity. The goal is to find discrepancies between expected and real behavior of the entity.

What is the need for functional testing?

Magento 2 offers a very complex architecture and it becomes very difficult to manually test everything. Also, manual testing can result in human mistakes due to complex flows.

Although unit testing and integration testing can cover the whole code but still don’t guarantee that everything will execute in the same way on different devices and browsers.

What is Magento Functional Testing Framework (MFTF)?

MFTF is a set of ready-made tests that check if a Magento 2 system functionality runs as expected. MFTF is based on selenium, codeception, allure, etc.

5 Key Features of MFTF –

Flexible, because of modularity support.

Customizability, for existing tests.

Informative, because of the reporting tool.

Suitable, because of test suites.

Compatible, because of web driver selection

Benefits of MFTF over Unit Tests

XML

MFTF tests are written in XML, so, you no longer need to learn PHP to write tests.

Merging

Merging is the most beneficial feature of MFTF. For example, we add a new field to the existing registration form of Magento website.

In the case of unit testing, we need to write test cases again for the complete page but in MFTF, we just need to provide extra attribute details and rest we can use the same test case code from the core.

Environment setup for MFTF

PHP version

Upgrade your PHP version according to Magento instance which you are using. In our case, we will be using Magento 2.3, and our PHP version is 7.2.13

Composer

Install the composer on your environment. Please follow the below link to install composer.

https://getcomposer.org/download/

Java

You need to install Java on your system to run the Selenium server.

Selenium server

Now install selenium jar file on your instance, which will help you to run MFTF test cases.Download the jar file and place it in the Magento root directory or some server (depends upon your requirement). Please follow the below link for download –

https://www.seleniumhq.org/download/

Web Browser Driver

You need browser driver (Mozilla, Chrome, Safari) to run your test cases. In our case, we are using the Google Chrome Driver. Follow the below link for download –

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads

Step by step guide to setup Magento Functional Testing Framework

Step 1 – Fresh Install Magento 2.3

I hope you are already aware of Magento 2 installation. But still, if you are new please refer to the following link for Magento 2 installation –

https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.3/install-gde/install-quick-ref.html

You can also download the Magento 2.3 from here and just extract it to your localhost directory. After that just hit the Magento directory on your browser and complete the Magento setup.

Step 2 – Install dependencies

We need to install the MFTF. Please follow below command –

composer install -d dev/tests/acceptance/

Step 3 – Build the project

In the Magento project root, run –

vendor/bin/mftf build:project

Step 4 – Edit environmental settings

In the [Magento_Root]/dev/tests/acceptance/ directory, edit the .env file to match your system.

vim dev/tests/acceptance/.env

Specify the following parameters, which are required for tests –

MAGENTO_BASE_URL – Must contain a domain name of the Magento instance that will be tested. Ex: http://127.0.0.1/magento2mftf/

MAGENTO_BACKEND_NAME: must contain the relative path for the Admin area. Ex: admin

MAGENTO_ADMIN_USERNAME: must contain the username required for authorization in the Admin area. Ex: admin

MAGENTO_ADMIN_PASSWORD: must contain the user password required for authorization in the Admin area. Ex: admin12345

Step 5 – Enable the Magento CLI commands

In the [Magento_Root]/dev/tests/acceptance directory, run the following command to enable the MFTF to send Magento CLI commands to your Magento instance.

cp dev/tests/acceptance/.htaccess.sample dev/tests/acceptance/.htaccess

Step 6 – Generate and run tests

To run tests, you need a running Selenium server and mftf commands.

Run the Selenium server in another terminal

Run the Selenium server in the terminal. Both selenium jar file and browser driver should be on the same place. In our case, both reside in the Magento root directory.

For example, the following commands run the Selenium server for Google Chrome –

cd <path_to_directory_with_selenium_server_and_webdriver>/Java -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=chromedriver -jar selenium-server-standalone-3.14.0.jar

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Getting started with Magento PWA Studio

On November 28, 2018, Magento introduced the most awaited release of Magento 2.3. Magento 2.3 has introduced a ton of new features along with a lot of smaller optimizations. But the most awaited feature is Magento PWA Studio. It is a suite of tools that empower developers to develop progressive web applications. Magento PWA Studio also uses GraphQL which is one of the new feature introduced in Magento 2.3.

What are Progressive Web Applications (PWA)?

Progressive Web Applications (PWA) are the future of web app development. PWA with Android Instant Apps is the next advancement in web industry after responsive web design. Progressive Web Apps uses progressive enhancements that offers features similar to a native mobile application. Progressive Web Apps and Android Instant Apps combined together lets you create beautiful apps with material design and animations without the need of installing them on any device. Have you ever encountered a popup while browsing a website on mobile device saying “ADD TO HOME SCREEN”? When you click on the button, the application installs itself in the background. Now that application shows in your app drawer and offers the experience of a native mobile application. The app was downloaded from a web application without seeing the face of Play Store or App Store. Isn’t it great!!! These PWA apps offer offline access to the content without the need of an internet connection. A Progressive Web App (PWA) is a web app that uses modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like experience to users. It is –

Progressive – because it lazy-loads itself. Web – because it’s written in the languages of the Web – HTML, CSS, and, JavaScript. An app – because it installs and runs code on the mobile device.

Features of PWA

PWA has numerous features that differentiate them from the traditional web and native applications –

Fully Responsive & Cross-Browser Compatibility PWA’s are built using progressive enhancement principles which is a web design strategy to provide the basic functionality and content to everyone irrespective of the browser.  So PWA’s work with all the available browsers and are fully responsive which offers the same experience to a tablet or a mobile user.

Fast & Secure PWA uses many optimization techniques to offer a blazing fast app experience and is completely secure as the apps are served through HTTPS, so no unauthorized user can access the app.

Works Offline PWA sites cache content to ensure that some content can be served when a user is offline.

Push Notifications PWA’s offers support for push notifications which helps in keeping the end-user engaged and motivated to open and use the app more often.

Easy Installation PWA’s are applications but are not distributed through app stores. The apps can be shared via a URL and can be easily installed by just visiting a site and adding it to the home screen.

Advantages of using PWA

For Website Owners Cost-Efficient Progressive Web App uses the web stack for the development. It results in less time and efforts which results in cost efficiency. Moreover, the same application can work on iOS, Android devices so you don’t need to build an app for multiple platforms.

Time-Saving Progressive Web App helps in saving your precious time as you don’t need to have a separate app for Android and iOS. One app can be used on both the platforms which result in faster time to market.

For End-Users Low Data Usage In many developing countries, mobile data is still an expensive commodity. PWA solves the data usage issue as it uses only a fraction of data compared to a native mobile app.

Easy Updates PWA offers up-to-date experience to users without the need of any installation. It also addresses the problem of software fragmentation as you don’t need to maintain an older version of the application.

Fast loading Loading time of a Progressive Web Application is 2-3x faster as compared to a responsive website or an m.dot web stores. It results in smooth performance on a mobile device.

What is the Magento PWA Studio?

Magento is becoming a Progressive Web Application platform. That means they made a suite of tools for building online stores as Progressive Web Applications.

These tools help developers learn PWA techniques, build lightning-fast PWA front-ends, and create PWA components and extensions for reuse or sale on the Magento Marketplace.

Taken together, they are tentatively calling this suite of tools the Magento PWA Studio. In other words, we can say –

Magento PWA Studio is used to develop online Magento stores as Progressive Web Apps. It is a set of tools used for the development of React-powered Magento 2 templates.

The Magento PWA Studio provides the following tools –

PWA-buildpack – PWA Buildpack is a build and development tool and library for Magento Progressive Web Apps. Use the PWA Buildpack project to set up and configure your local environment for PWA development. peregrine – The Peregrine project is a collection of UI components for Magento PWA projects. Use, extend, or remix these components to create a unique Magento PWA storefront. Venia storefront /PWA Storefront – As we know that when Magento 2 comes it brings a new default theme under the name “Luma”. Luma is a very clean, easy on the eyes and elegant theme that has adopted better usability practices. Luma was just a proof by Magento that how the theme is built on the basis of their blank theme. In the same manner, Magento PWA Studio introduces Venia storefront as a proof-of-concept PWA built using PWA Studio. In its current state, the storefront contains examples for product details and category pages. Venia is a PWA storefront that runs on top of an existing Magento 2 backend.

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Magento 2 vs Magento 1 – Is the upgrade worth it?

VT Netzwelt is one of the leading digital technology Company offering e-commerce development services. Magento is one of the most popular e‐commerce carts, which presently enjoys a market share of around 30 percent. In fact, it has recorded a 60 % higher growth in the year 2014 as compared to the year 2013.

Magento 2.0 was released on November 2015, after four years of development, aiming to replace the 1.x version of the eCommerce platform. A new version of the platform was released simultaneously for the Enterprise and the Community Edition, thus introducing new features and functionality within the paid and the free eCommerce solution provided by Magento. VT Netzwelt offering the best Magento development services and in order to create the perfect online business store, you need an e-commerce platform that offers easy customization. This helps in maximizing sales and optimizing operations Since Magento Community Edition (Magento CE) is free to download, it is up to you to decide whether to upgrade to the latest 2.x version and how. Those holding licenses for Magento Enterprise Edition 1.x (Magento EE) can extend their licenses for the current version of the software but must upgrade to Magento 2 before December 2018. Hence, like it or not, merchants using Magento 1 will be forced to upgrade to Magento 2 or migrate to another eCommerce platform by the end of 2018. By that date, the 1.x versions of the community edition will be so archaic that they will require a virtually mandatory upgrade as well. Is the upgrade worth it? It depends on many factors such as the technical requirements to implement the new version and the total cost of ownership. Furthermore, you should check whether you could take complete advantage of the new key features, which you are paying for.

System requirements

Let’s take a look at the system requirements. Magento 1 is running on Linux x86 and x86-64 while Magento 2 can be deployed only on the newer Linux x86-64. It is hard to tell whether this is bad or good news in the short-run and it all depends on your existing server environment or the software infrastructure of your hosting provider. If your organization or hosting provider does not plan to switch completely to Linux x86-64 in the near feature, then you may consider staying with Magento 1. Both versions require Apache or Nginx web server, with Magento 2 supporting the most recent version of the software. Magento 1 needs PHP 5.4 or 5.5 to run while Magento 2 can take advantage of the new features provided by the PHP 7.0.2 version. A notable improvement in Magento 2 is the integration of new technologies like HTML 5, CSS 3, support for PHP 7 and Apache 2.2. That said, Magento 2 naturally integrates the latest frameworks, which, in theory, should boost speed and provide better customer experience through improved technology. Magento 1 requires MySQL 5.6 (Oracle or Percona) database while the new versions support MySQL 5.6.x. Magento 2.0 and 2.1 are able to use three master databases, providing scalability of key areas such as order management, product management, and checkout, which in turn results in better performance. This is a notable improvement towards better scalability but is not a factor you should consider if you already run a stable software environment and do not plan aggressive expansion in the near future.

Key new features

Magento 2 offers major improvements in the administrative user interface, which now allows merchants to access their online stores using responsive navigation through devices based on touch technology. The import and export of products were improved to support cross-sales and upselling. A step-by-step product creation tools enable faster creation of configurable products bypassing the manual creation of a simple product required in the earlier Magento versions. Drag-and-drop administrative tools are another notable improvement, especially compared to the quite unintuitive UI of the older versions. Another key improvement is the checkout process that now requires only 2 steps, compared to the 5-step process in the older version. The overall experience was also improved through one-click account creation and auto-recognition of registered clients. A 5-step checkout in the older version is definitely something you should be worrying about since most eCommerce platforms already provide functionality for a 2-step or 3-step checkout. The majority of marketing experts are of opinion that 2-step checkout and guest checkout markedly improve conversion rates. The new Magento edition supports full page caching through the Varnish web accelerator, providing faster page loading time. It also provides new built-in responsive themes for faster store creation. Well, page and site caching are offered also at the level of your hosting but faster website loading matters nowadays. One should also welcome a new functionality for better compression of images and faster loading of JavaScript in content-rich stores. This will result in better performance of Magento 2-based merchants. Magento 2 also provides support for Composer, a PHP dependency manager, to manage dependencies when developing extensions or tweaking the codebase. This new feature should help your developers in the implementation of flawless customizations to your store, which is a good thing. Although not exactly a feature, the Magento commitment to quarterly updates of the platform should be considered a major improvement. Furthermore, Magento Connect was reorganized into Magento Marketplace where all extensions to the eCommerce platform are assessed by the team of Magento. It is not a money-back guarantee but introduces a new level of reliability for both free and paid third-party extensions. Read More