Magento 2

Magento is an eCommerce platform built on open source technology that provides online merchants with a flexible shopping cart system. It offers powerful marketing, search engine optimization, and catalog-management tools.
Magento is the fastest growing and most powerful eCommerce platform in the world. Since being launched in 2007, Magento has grown to become one of the most powerful eCommerce platforms in the industry.

Why is Magento the most preferred E-Commerce Platform?

  • Magento platform comes packed with loads of user-friendly features.
  • It allows updating ecommerce website automatically, which is not available in other e- commerce platforms.
  • It is simple, quick and versatile, which makes it easy for customers to search and purchase products and services through Magento-powered websites.
  • Magento offers users with highly interactive shopping experience.
  • Besides supporting multiple website, Magento also lends support to online stores in promoting their inventory in diverse domains.
  • Magento being designed to be a configuration based MVC system (along with a range of extensions) helps to make website highly scalable.
  • Magento e-commerce platform features include a powerful SEO, marketing and catalogue management tools so as to fulfill exclusive business requirements of merchants.
  • It can increase the efficiency of operations and widen product reach by integrating Magento store with other outlets.

Versions of Magento

One of the currently used version in Magento is the Community Edition, which is free, open source platform that is designed for developers to build upon.

Since the first public beta version was released in 2007, the Magento Community Edition has been developed and customized in order to provide a basic eCommerce platform for businesses from all industries. The latest version: 1.9.0.1 was released on 15th May 2014. And the new upcoming version, Magento 2, is in the development phase.

Magento 2

Magento 2 aims to provide an interesting set of features which includes, performance improvement, efficient development and latest security features. Magento 2 comes with a distinctive set of changed/improved frontend approaches compared to its predecessor Magento 1.X. Magento 2.0 will run on PHP 5.3 and Zend Framework as 1.0. And it will support MSSQL, Oracle and some other database as well. The frontend is now updated with newer technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery. Considering the theme workflow, one of the first changes in Magento 2 is certainly the removal of skin directory. Everything is organized directly under the app structure.

Another big change is that every module has its own VIEW directory where all module-specific templates, layouts, js, and css/less files are stored. This is a better approach and certainly, it will be beneficial for module developers. All visual content will be stored directly within the module, separating it from previous versions.

There are also significant changes/improvements to overall layout manipulation, file structure and a brand new introduction to Magento UI library heavily based on LESS preprocessor with built in compiler. Reason for choosing LESS over other pre-processors is because Magento 2 comes with internal compiler to compile CSS directly from PHP. This will speed up development and allow developers to focus just on file editing/production while the system covers all the hassle with compiling etc. Magento UI Library certainly provides a lot of powerful material and ideas in general, especially for projects that require more of a skinning type approach. Layout files are now divided into smaller parts. For Magento 2.0, the directories structures will be quite similar to the Zend Framework. This is very exciting for theme development as things like Layout Templates, CSS, Images, JavaScript become more modular. You can manage all of them within a module folder. Probably the intention is to simplify the maintenance. Magento 2 introduces the new concept for product/media image resizing actions right from the layout.

One of the great changes in Magento 2 is the introduction of a container wrapper, successor to a core/text_list block type which served the role of a structural block in the previous versions of the system, thereby introduces the possibility to pass attributes like htmlTag,htmlClass, htmlId directly from layout files which is really interesting.

Being in the development phase, Magento 2 is a substantially improved system when it comes to frontend development, compared to its predecessor.

It is difficult to set up automated tests for Unit Testing, Integration, Functional and Performance Testing as Magento doesn’t have such module by default. With Magento 2.0, you can set up automated tests pretty easily compared to the 1.x series. Hence, there is a great deal of focus on the improved standards in code quality. The testing framework integrated with Magento 2 includes the following:

  • Integration Testing(framework)
  • Unit Testing
  • Static Testing
  • Performance Testing
  • JavaScript Testing
  • Legacy and Migration Testing

All these testing techniques enable integrations to achieve a larger success and helps merchants run their business much more effectively.

Magento has increased its focus in making the upgrade easier for both Enterprise and Community Editions. With the availability of tools specific for upgradation, the process to upgrade from Magento 2.0 to 2.x and the upgrade from a Community Edition to an Enterprise Edition will be much easier.

With the 2.0, the performance of Magento will be at least 20% faster than the latest Magento 1.x versions.

With all-new technologies included, improved architecture and workflow, frontend development now requires a far more professional approach than before.

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