Magento 2 Merchant Beta Release Webinar – Summary

Migration tool will be available to enable seamless migration from Magento 1.x to Magento 2. Migrate to Magento 2 while it is still seamless.

“eBay Enterprise actually has a few little gems. And one of those little gems is Magento” – that’s from the Karen’s blog. A statement that echoes the sentiments of Magento merchants and developers.  The Magento community is closely watching the development of Magento 2.  Even as innovative and configurable eCommerce platforms are gnawing at the heels of Magento ,  Magento 2 will be the make or break product for the ecosystem.

Magento 2 developer Beta has been available from Dec 2014 and since then there has been a mixture of response from the development teams – challenges in installation, excitement about the new features and improvements in performance.

Magento 2 Merchant Beta Release Webinar presented by

• Elena Leonova (Manager, Product Management)
• William Harvey (Domain Product Owner, Performance and Scalability)
• Ryan Thompson (Director, Business Development)
• Paul Boisvert (Director, Product Management)

on July 16^th 2015, provided more information and updates on

• The new features  and functionalities
• Performance and Scalability
• Magento Connect
• Migration
• Training
• Support for Magento 1.x
• Useful Links

Magento 2 Merchant Beta Release Webinar

Features and Functionalities

• New and enhanced functionalities like streamlined checkout and new payment gateways.
• The EE module has merchant features like
  • Import/export functionality
  • Color swatches  and size swatches
  • Basic product visualization
  • Visual merchandising
  • Transactional emails and more

• New and improved UX for
  • Keyword search
  • Expanding filters
  • Custom views
  • Drag and drop column reordering
  • Configurable columns etc

Performance and Scalability

• Holistic approach to improve shopper experience.
• Enhanced performance and scalability on both Magento Community and Enterprise.
• Improved product import/export – 100K products in 25 min.

Improvements on server-side architecture include

• Varnish 4 support.
• Compatibility with HHVM.
• Layout performance improvement.

Improvements on client-server architecture include

• Static content caching in browser.
• Reduced JS code.
• Effective image compression.

Scalability – Catalog

• 200K page views/hour (without Varnish).
• 10M page views/hour (with Varnish).
• Support of extra large catalog – 1.5M simple products, 5K categories, 150K configurables.

Scalability – Checkout

• 50K orders/hours (CE Version)
• 90K+ orders/hour (EE Version)
• Support of 300+ concurrency with zero errors level

Scalabity –  Backend

 (Results derived using standard test configuration and a XL Magento merchant profile)

Magento Connect

The new connect comes with a dashboard that provides sales analytics, customer analytics, page views including sales by country and average rating. The new connect will help the developers to upload, sell, track and monetize their extensions. It has

• Improved Search.
• Improved Content Modules (Featured Extensions, Top Sellers etc).
• Revised Categories and Pages.
• Integrated Billing and Payments (Subscription payment not supported as of now).

Merchants will find the new connect more user friendly and will enable them to find, purchase, download and install extensions in a faster and easier manner.

The extensions need to adhere to the new stringent rules to ensure the quality of the extensions.

The video of the New Connect can be viewed in https://vimeo.com/125955416

Migration

Migration tool will be available to enable seamless migration from Magento 1.x to Magento 2.

Developers can download  Magento 2 migration whitepaper from the link below.

http://enterprise.magento.com/content/magento-2-migration-whitepaper

Training

The webinar stressed the importance on the state of preparedness of the developer community and to achieve this training holds the key. To encourage developers to familiarize themselves with Magento 2, Magento U offers a deep discount for learning the ‘Fundamentals of Magento 2 development’.

More details about the course is available below…

http://magento.com/training/catalog/fundamentals-of-magento-2-development#.VaiHFPmqqko

Q&A Session

There was a Q&A session at the end of the webinar where queries on certification , Magento connect etc were raised.

The 1.x certification will be valid even after Magento 2 is released (that’s a big relief for current 1.x Magento certified developers , designers and solution specialists  🙂 ) . The Magento 2 certification will be available only after Magento 2 is implemented in several clients and becomes stable, which should take an year or two.

Also, Magento will support EE 1.13 and EE 1.14 for 3 years from General Availability.

With lots of excitement and bated breath, the Magento community is waiting for the block buster product – Magento 2.

Useful Links

• Magento 2 Training: Fundamentals of Magento 2 Development
• Magento 2 Codebase: https://github.com/magento/magento2
• Magento 2 Documentation: http://devdocs.magento.com/
• Magento Forums: http://community.magento.com/t5/Core-Technology-Magento-2/ct-p/Magento-2
• Magento 2 Developer Hub: http://www.magento.com/developers/magento2
• See more at: http://magento.com/blog/technical/magento-2-merchant-beta-release#sthash.FpVsq4YF.dpuf

References

• http://magento.com/blog/technical/magento-2-merchant-beta-release
• Screenshots and inputs for the blog are from the webinar on Magento 2 Merchant Beta Release on July 16, 2015.