In the Magento world everyone is eagerly anticipating the release of Magento 2.0 in the fall of 2015 (hopefully). But what is new new or different in Magento 2.0?
1) Speed
One of the first changes that seems to be apparent through our testing and working with Magento 2.0 is that the front-end is lightning fast. There doesn’t appear to be much lag or time between page loads. Although I didn’t set up actual speed tests, I can honestly say this hasn’t always been true for Magento 1.X, and the difference was apparent right off the bat. Magento 2.0 is going to be incorporated with Varnish Cache – making it even faster. On top of that, one of the other improvements comes in the form of a faster indexing process. Everyone who has had the pleasure of working with 1.x indexing knows that this will be a vast improvement.
2) New Extension Ecosystem
Another big difference is promised changes into the extension ecosystem. Currently, as it stands, anyone can make an extension and upload it without any peer-review. This can lead to malicious extensions being found on the extension store, and as a result, once installed store’s are being compromised. With Magento 2.0 there has been a big push for review of all modules and extensions that will appear on the Magento store. With that said, it has yet to be released or proven that those changes will indeed be coming.
3) Improved User Experience
Perhaps the biggest difference between Magento 1.x and 2.0 is going to be the user experience. The biggest difference I’ve noticed is a much friendlier looking admin panel. The admin panel is more intuitive and easier to understand. Everything is nicely grouped under an appropriate section. With Magento 1.x it’s sometimes difficult for even someone who works with Magento everyday to always remember where some particular setting is! The front-end also has a nicer, more modern feel to it. However, as mentioned prior, the biggest changes come in the form of the backend.
4) Use of jQuery Instead of Prototype
Overall, one of the biggest changes for Magento 2.0 is going to be what’s under the hood. Not much might be noticed from the outside as much as the inside. One issue that constantly shows itself on the 1.x platform is javascript conflicts. Magento 2.0 will be moving away from Prototype and to jQuery instead. This is expected to eliminate the majority of conflicts and problems that can be found on a 1.x install. Another big change is that there is now a focus on the software requirements for the Magento 2.0 installs. There are specific versions of MySQL and PHP that must be installed to run the Magento 2.0 store. While there are some requirements for 1.x, most hosts that we have encountered, thus-far, besides Nexcess, have not been able to accomodate these types of requirements right off the bat.
All in all, I want to re-iterate that the biggest change that I have noticed is the speed. Magento 2.0 is incredibly fast and I have seen very few Magento stores that deliver that kind of speed without some sort of extensions or server optimization. If for this reason alone, I would definitely recommend that merchants keep an eye out for when the Stable version is released. Speed is widely known as one of the most important factors for consumers, and even as little as .5 of a second can make all the difference.
Magento Development Lead
