During July 2020 Adobe will introduce a new release of Magento — Magento Commerce and Open Source 2.4. This release of Magento Commerce is a win-win for both admins and shoppers. Customers are receiving long-awaited B2B capabilities that include streamlined purchasing while admins score upgraded possibilities when it comes to customer experience. Magento 2.4.0 beta is already available for partners like Atwix, but the GA release is planned for the near future. As we are approach the General Availability date, we want to share with you what changes to expect in the release.
As a minor release, it provides a system upgrade to support for PHP 7.4, Elasticsearch 7.6.x, and MySQL 8.0 together with third-party payment method integrations removal in order to be compliant with PSD2 (Payment Service Directive 2) and 3-D Secure 2.0. This means merchants should install and configure official payment modules before proceeding with Magento 2 upgrade. You can check the detailed information on Magento 2.4 technology stack requirements here.
With the Magento 2.4 release, a security-only patch, 2.3.5-p2 will be available. This patch should be installed as soon as possible to secure your store from already known vulnerabilities.
Magento Commerce and Open Source 2.4.0 includes:
- All core code improvements from the previous version
- Over 100 new core code fixes
- More than 30 security enhancements
Thanks to Magento Community devoted work, 226 GitHub issues solutions were added to the new version. We recently wrote about how Magento Contributors continuously help with platform improvements — check it out.
Changes in Magento Commerce and Open Source 2.4
A new level of security
The Content Security Policy tool that protects against Cross-Site Scripting and related attacks was improved. A new version also brings changes to default settings in the Admin panel:
- Two-factor authentication for the Magento admin is enabled by default — a user will be prompted to set up the 2FA upon first log in into Magento 2
- CMS pages and blocks template filter strict mode is enabled
- Data rendering for UI data providers is disabled
Platform upgrades
The following versions will no longer be supported and have to be upgraded or replaced:
- PHP 7.1 and 7.2
- PHPUnit 6.5
- MySQL catalog search engine
- Elasticsearch 2.x, 5.x, 6.x, 7.5.x
- core integration with Signifyd
- core integration with Braintree
- Zend Framework
Those merchants who stay ahead of the curve will be happy to hear that Magento now supports:
- PHP 7.4
- PHPUnit 9.x
- MySQL 8.0
- MariaDB 10.4
- Elasticsearch 7.6.x
- Linux Foundation’s Laminas Project
Infrastructure improvements
- Removal of all build-in payment methods including Authorize.Net, Braintree, eWay, CyberSource, and Worldpay integrations
- Support of partial words terms search in Magento 2 Elasticsearch is now available
- PayPal Express Checkout integration is moved to PayPal JavaScript
- Deprecation of the Web Set-Up Wizard, command line will now be used for installation
- Composer plugin update to protect against overwriting customizations
- GraphQL enhancements
- Magento Functional Testing Framework (MFTF) v3.0.0
- Magento Commerce Cloud now fully supports Microsoft Azure
Speed improvements
- Improvements to customer data section invalidation logic to correctly populate local storage
- Multiple optimizations to Redis performance, which includes network data transfers size decrease, automated determination of what needs to be loaded, reduction in race conditions
- SQL queries to inventory tables caching results improvement
- Image lazy loading is now natively supported
Merchant tools
- Adobe Stock Integration v2.0 with an ability to license stock image previews from the Media Gallery
- New Media Gallery provides 30x faster searchable interface for Magento media assets
- In-store pickup and bundle product support in Inventory Management (MSI)
B2B features
- Order Approval Workflow – Having this out of the box with Magento Commerce is a huge game-changer for many B2B businesses
- Administrators can also log in to customer accounts for B2B
- Accelerate B2B purchasing – faster re-ordering, add to cart function as well as CMS, Product Page, and Category view under load
Vendor-developed extension enhancements
When upgrading to Magento 2.4, a merchant should check if all of their Magento Marketplace extensions are compatible with PHP 7.4.
- Dotdigital prepared a number of improvements, among which a possibility to show a stock figure for configurable products and other fixes
- Amazon Pay provides an ability to do multiple authorizations for a multi-item order and other minor features
- Klarna and Vertex introduce some efficiency improvements
- Yotpo Ratings and Reviews are integrated with Page Builder
Outline
For more detailed information on vendor-developed extension enhancements and fixed issues, check Magento 2.4.0 Open Source Release Notes and Magento 2.3.5 Commerce Release Notes. Special attention can be given to Magento PWA Studio with the Magento course on a client-rendered frontend framework to leverage the performance of a website. This release brings not only security and performance enhancements but a bunch of new existing features. Make sure your store is prepared to conquer the top e-commerce giants with Atwix Magento 2 development agency. Contact your partner to learn more, or click contact us to get a free performance audit from Atwix.