Adobe has recently released the latest iteration of its Magento 2 platform. The latest version of the platform is now v2.4.1. They have also released a security upgrade for v2.3, making v2.3.6 the latest release on the v2.3 release branch.
So what’s been included? In this post, we will review the new features that have been included.
What’s new in Magento v2.4.1?
Magento Open Source v2.4.1 comes with a host of new features and updates. We’ve highlighted some of these below:
15 major security fixes and improvements
The Magento v2.4.1 release comes with a large number of security fixes and improvements. The new v2.4.0-p1 and v2.3.6 have had these security fixes back ported to them so that merchants can apply the security upgrade quickly to enable them to plan the upgrade to the latest version. We advise that all our clients do this to allow us to review and test the new release and to allow 3rd party extension developers to iron out any bugs that the new release may cause with their extensions.
Checkout captcha challenge
A controversial feature of the v2.4.1 release is the application of a captcha challenge to the payment step of the checkout. The purpose of this is to prevent any bots from placing orders on your website. The major downside of this is that it puts an additional hurdle in front of your customers when they are placing orders on your website. We will be advising clients to remove this feature, as there are much better ways of dealing with bots trying to place dummy orders on your site.
New admin media gallery
The media gallery in the admin area of Magento 2 has always been a feature that has needed a make over. In this release of Magento 2, we finally got it! The new and improved media gallery includes the following features:
- Delete images in bulk.
- Highlight images that are duplicates or not used on the frontend of your website.
- Filter images by the store front they appear in.
- Apply image meta data updates.
GraphQL & PWA Studio
Adobe are continuing in their persistent pursuit of pushing all their merchants to switch to a PWA storefront. The release contains a large number of updates to PWA studio and increases GraphQL API coverage. We’re still not convinced by the PWA studio argument. Yes it can greatly improve your websites performance, but there are alternatives coming soon that can allow you to achieve the same results for a fraction of the price. We believe the future of the Magento 2 frontend lies in these new and upcoming frameworks but a Magento solution partner will probably tell you otherwise.
The main reason we believe Adobe are pushing this new technology is so they can eventually drop their terrible frontend framework that continues to be a thorn in the side of all Magento 2 developers and is beginning to effect Magento 2 website search rankings as Google has also took notice of how bad it is.
Summary
So in summary there isn’t really a lot to shout about with the latest Magento 2 upgrade in terms of features but this is not a bad thing. Reviewing the release, we can clearly see that a large number of bugs have been fixed making the platform a lot more stable. This will come as great news to existing merchants as they still battle with issues in the core platform that are taking far too long to resolve by the core team. We’ve held off deploying the v2.4 upgrade as we didn’t believe it was stable enough. However with this release, we will be advising that clients upgrade in the new year.
Are you ready to upgrade?
Adobe are scheduling to release new version of Magento 2 every quarter. With this in mind, it’s super important that you have an upgrade strategy in place. Magento 2 upgrades don’t have to be things that merchants dread. This is of course dependent on whether or not your store has been developed in the right way. At Foundation Commerce we have upgrade strategies in place with all our clients. We normally advise clients to allow a day to carry out the necessary development work. We hear stories of other agencies taking months to apply upgrades and this is not standard practise.
Submit the form at the bottom of the page to speak with one of our Magento 2 developers. They’ll be more than happy to help you put a Magento 2 upgrade strategy in place. We’ve successfully upgraded multiple Magento 2 merchants and continue to work with them as an extension of their existing team.