Last night Magento Inc. hosted Magento 2.2 Developer Webinar. The timing for that webinar was terrible for Australians – at 1 am normal people sleep, but fortunately a recording was provided afterwards. It is almost one hour video and if you have time it worth checking there.
Otherwise, we have prepared highlights of what we have found the most interesting in this webinar, especially from a merchant prospective.
Timeline
- Magento team considers the code for version 2.2 around 80% complete and soon makes it open for testing and bug reports for interested developers
- Then it comes through few other pre-release steps and the plan to make it available for general public in September 2017
Features
Magento 2.2 is a new major release, so will be packed with number of new functionality that both merchant and developers expect. More details below.
Advanced Reporting
Magento 2.2 will include better reporting capabilities with more reports available for eCommerce store owners and managers. That reports will employ better visualisation and help to track important eCommerce business KPIs.
B2B features
This is probably the most exciting part. Enterprise analysts (Gartner, Forrester) often criticised Magento Enterprise for lack of out of the box B2B features and seems that Magento is making a big step forward to address this.
So Magento 2.2. B2B features will include:
- Multi-level structured company account with hierarchy of users and workflows
- Quotation system, when business users can send RFQ and merchants can manage them within Magento
- Improved ordering process – quick orders (including via uploading CSV file with SKUs), reorders and purchase lists
- Account credits payment and management
- Customised catalogues with individual products and tier prices that can be assigned to one of group of customers
- API with fast tier prices update processing
There is one catch – all this great B2B features will be available for Magento Enterprise clients only.
Signifyd integration
Magento 2.2. will include out of the box integration with Signifyd – fraud prevention solution, one of not many that provides warranty on chargebacks. BTW, Magenable is an official partner of Signifyd.
Platform and performance improvements
- More modern technology stack support
- Improved security
- Better development and testing tools
- Work with big shopping cart (up to 300 lines)
- New performance toolkit
Bug fixes
While improvements and new features are great, developers and merchants expect that Magento 2.2 will include many bug fixes that were reported and fixed often months ago, but haven’t been included in 2.0.x and 2.1.x releases. It is “must do” for Magento and we hope not to be disappointed.
Credits
All images used in this blog post are screenshots from Magento official webinar for developers
Update
28/06/17 Magento 2.2. Release Candidate is now available. If you want to give it a try, check Magento official announcement
