In February 2021, the latest version of Magento was released (2.4.2) with many benefits and advantages. This version revolves around the new security, performance, and enhancement feature. It would benefit merchants to upgrade to the latest version of Magento. It will also help them better manage and secure their online stores. This will aid in increasing eCommerce traffic in uncertain times of the pandemic. Read ahead to discover the major highlights and advantages of Magento and see if it is the right enterprise for you.
B2B Commerce
Magento is truly committed to its B2B merchants, hence this release caters to them directly. There have been enhancements to the B2B buyer and seller purchase approval experience. This includes support for online payments which gives sellers the ability to accept purchasing policies regardless of the payment method. There are also new GraphQL APIs to improve B2B capabilities.
GraphQL
This release has added GraphQL with the following features:
- Added support for comparison lists
- Added ‘generateCustomerTokenAsAdmin’ mutation
- Added localization support across stores to support tasks such as changing languages, carts, and currencies
- Added support for unions in Magento GraphQL
- Enhanced GraphQL schema to optimize product data retrieval
PWA Studio
This update of Magento 2 offers the benefit of an enhanced PWA studio. These improvements will help merchants in speeding up the launch of international sites. These sites will be launched as high-performing PWAs. They will also have multi-language and multi-currency support.
The latest release 9.0.0 has added “My Account” components for Venia, extensibility improvements, and performance optimizations. This results in a faster time to market and a lower total cost of ownership with PWA Studio.
Media Gallery
There have been new role resources for the Media Gallery. This Magento release benefits merchants to limit administrator access to only the Media Gallery. It also gives merchants control over who can perform the following functions:
- Insert media assets into content
- Upload assets
- Edit asset details
- Delete assets from the Media Gallery
- Manage folder structure
Web-Optimized Images in Content
Merchants now have the facility of using web-optimized images in their content in place of high-resolution images. The original image will remain unmodified in the Media Gallery. The image rendition will be dynamically generated when the image is inserted into the content.
Adobe Stock Integration
This release of Magento includes Adobe Stock Integration v2.11. This integration includes the addition of support for reading exif_image.png or exif-image.jpeg metadata. The content that is displayed when you click the ‘Default View’ bookmark for the Media Gallery is not filtered anymore. Before this update, the default view contained a filter that had been applied from the url-filter applier.
Magento Functional Testing Framework (MFTF)
The Magento Functional Testing Framework (MFTF) 3.2.1 feature is now available as an added benefit. The new Magento release has introduced error tolerance in tests and test suite generation. There are also additional enhancements and bug fixes. The enhancements focus on customizability and fixes, including fixing an issue that causes Magento bin/Magento to fail when xdebug 3 is used.
Platform Enhancements
Elasticsearch 7.9.x
Elasticsearch 7.9.x is now supported. Although Magento 2.4.x remains compatible with Elasticsearch 7.4.x, it is recommended to run it with Elasticsearch 7.9.x.
Varnish 6.4
Magento 2.4.2 has been tested with Varnish 6.4. At the same time, Magento 2.4.x remains compatible with Varnish 6.x.
Redis 6.x
Redis 6.x is now compatible with Magento 2.4.x. Simultaneously, Magento 2.4.x features and benefits remain compatible with Redis 5.x.
Composer 2.x
Magento 2.4.2 is now compatible with Composer 2.x. Merchants are recommended to migrate to Composer 2.x. This release can be installed through Composer 1.x, but its life will end soon.
Analytics
Other advantages of Magento include the feature of Advanced Reporting now working as expected for multiple environments in the same domain. The CSV files that were previously generated by Advanced Reporting failed. This was because double quotes were escaped with backlashes rather than with another double quote as required by CSV standard RFC4180.
Another advancement is that the Magento ‘analytics_collect_data’ feature works successfully now when using either the default or non-default port to connect to MySQL in env.php. The CVS files that are generated by ‘analytics_collect_data’ are now properly escaped. Previously, inventory reports could not be generated because files had not been generated with correct escaping.
Bundle Products
Magento has stopped setting prices for fixed-price bundle product items in quotes. When bundle products include out-of-stock products, price sorting works as expected. Before this update, sorting prices in descending order did not display products in order of decreasing prices. Magento 2.4.2 now applies a default quantity of 1 for bundle product options when many options exist as an added benefit. Before the update, merchants had to manually assign a default quantity to each option.
The order invoice ‘create page’ now displays the child products for bundles as expected. When you re-order simple products that are a part of a bundle product with a custom price, the Magento features assign correct product prices which benefit merchants. Previously, setting custom prices on a bundle product resulted in incorrect prices on attached simple products when reordered.
Key Takeaways
We can see that the advantages of Magento 2.4.2 are packed with many features that provide enhancements and benefits to merchants. These include B2B advancements, GraphQL APIs enhancements, PWA Studio, and Media Gallery upgrades. There have also been several security fixes along with upgrades to the platform quality. Third-party file storage systems are now supported by the Magento cloud.
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