What's New in Magento v2.3?
Magento 2.3 sports a suite of new and exciting tools that enable merchants to fuel their online growth while also empowering developers to fulfill their clients’ expectations more effectively and efficiently. A number of updates and enhancements are offered through Magento 2.3 across the entire platform compared to previous versions.
Compared to Magento 1, which is being sunset in June 2020, Magento v2.3 impressively enhances how the platform empowers merchants, leverages data and technology to drive experiences, and offers functionality to meet rising customer expectations.
As a team, we have worked across multiple versions of Magento, and these changes continue to demonstrate Magento’s unending focus on delivering an industry-leading enterprise eCommerce platform.
Multi-Source Inventory (MSI)
This functionality enables merchants to natively manage inventory from multiple sources for order fulfillment. This is particularly beneficial if you stock your online store with items from different warehouses as the online store can then properly reflect your physical warehouses. Behind the scenes, inventory is now “reserved” within a table structure instead of automatically decrementing the available stock – this avoids the need for additional reindexing and addresses some performance issues that arise during peak times.
Progressive Web Apps (PWA) Studio
The PWA Studio is a set of developer tools that enable you to develop, deploy, and maintain a Progressive Web App storefront over Magento 2.
Progressive Web Apps are a relatively recent frontend technology that combines the advantages of both native mobile apps and websites to create “headless” web pages that can leverage unique device features (e.g., camera, push notifications) and still “progressively” scale back on devices where those features are not available.
PWAs are typically built on a JavaScript framework for handling and displaying data, while also communicating with a backend (Magento 2) via REST API. This approach produces a major increase in front-end performance.
Page Builder
Powered by Bluefoot CMS, the Magento 2 PageBuilder is an intuitive drag-and-drop visual content editing tool that enables merchants to position and compose page layouts. It features flexible row and column layouts, similar in functionality to traditional CMS platforms like WordPress. Non-technical users can create pages that combine content and commerce without having to write any HTML or CSS markup.
Magento Shipping
Magento Shipping is an intelligent multi-carrier shipping and fulfillment solution that combines automation capabilities, access to global carrier networks, and seamless integration with the Magento 2 admin dashboard. This shipping engine, powered by Temando, delivers the following benefits:
- Automate order fulfillment and logistics;
- Reduce shipping-related costs;
- Drive cart conversion and revenue;
- Provide accelerated revenue growth, and boost business efficiency;
- Manage multiple carriers from a single, integrated portal;
- Check for conflicts automatically with extensions during setup to help avoid issues during development and testing;
- Simplify ongoing maintenance by automatically including new carriers and features without having to update.
GraphQL
The GraphQL query language was created by Facebook in 2015. The usage of this API technology enables progressive web apps (PWAs) to push and pull information from your Magento store using smaller packets of data. This results in faster loading times, even on slower network connections, by reducing network transfers by getting smaller amounts of data over fewer API requests.
Asynchronous & Bulk APIs
Currently, an API request is queued up until Magento completes executing the request before it. If there are a larger number of changes and requests, then the longer the amount of time it will take for the response to be returned.
However, with asynchronous API, multiple requests can be run in tandem at the same time without having to wait for previous queued responses from the server.
This edition offers improved performance for integration tasks that require large amounts of API calls or batch processing.
Declarative Schema
The new declarative scheme enables developers to define database structure and changes through XML files instead of the traditional data and install scripts. This makes it simpler to install and upgrade Magento versions. Magento will convert the XML scheme into a series of SQL statements and execute them.
This change helps to reduce bugs, improve performance, and speed up development.
New Security Tools
With the release of v2.3, Magento has placed a renewed emphasis on improving the security, scalability, and performance of the platform. Two recently included services as part of this effort, Google reCAPTCHA, and Two-Factor Authentication, can reduce access to your website, protect it from spam and abuse, and help to ensure it is only used by humans and not by robots.
Through enhanced security, improved performance, and more developer functionality, Magento 2.3 provides powerful new merchant and developer experience enhancements to grow their business.
Magento 2.3 combines features that are great for inventory management, front-end performance optimization, and improved integration structures. Clearly, the trend is richer features for end-users and a faster, more powerful architecture for developers.
The Magento team continues to deliver forward-looking updates and industry-leading solutions. As Magento 1 end-of-life approaches and you compare eCommerce platforms to Magento 2, we encourage you to consider the always-evolving nature of Adobe.
The 2019 Magento Imagine conference further evidenced Magento’s commitment to eCommerce success with the announcement of additional Adobe integrations in the pipeline as part of the Magento 2019 roadmap. The Magento team at Adobe offers insights and unmatched commitment to the future that set you up to continuously expand the eCommerce experience.
