Magento 2 – A new innovation in e-commerce and its key features

The new platform in Magento 2 offers enhanced performance and scalability which increases its demand in business and acceptability among partners and developers .It also improves sales and productivity by providing a more user-friendly dashboard and exciting new features. The new platform also offers unmatched flexibility and innovation opportunities to the global ecosystem of partners and developers.

Some key features in Magento 2 are

Improved performance

Magento 2 is almost 20 % faster than Magento 1. Faster site speed encourages more sales and increases website search engine optimization. Full-page caching built into the platform means pages load a lot faster, 1-2 seconds compared to the 5-10 seconds for non-caching pages. It can also handle better many catalog pages without slowing down. This makes it scalable for large stores and able to grow with an online business. The figure below shows its performance and scalability.

 

Reduced upgrade efforts and costs

Magento 2 effectively reduces the effort of upgrading core Magento software as well as installing and upgrading extensions compared to Magento 1. Magento 2 includes updated information on versioning policies and upgrade compatibility to help and support the developers for upgrading older versions to Magento new versions. Installing new Magento version is much faster and easier than the old one. This installer will check for pre-requisites before starting the installation process. It serves as an independent script from the application/platform. Therefore, system integrators can easily script Magento installations and upgrades to create standard deployments.

Better Security

The latest version Magento 2 introduces some new features and methods to deal with server validation. In additions with this the payment gateways such as PayPal, Braintree, and Authorize.net integrated with this will also provide much security and ability to pursue the easiest level of PCI compliance, depending on the selected payment method.

Great UX – Friendly backend UI and menu system grouped by function

An user-friendly backend UI for store owners has been introduced. The menu system is grouped in two management functions: eCommerce and System. All menus involved in managing your online store, such as Product, Marketing, Content, Report, etc. are displayed in a clear Flat menu type and are organized in a more logical and user-friendly way.

With Magento 2, multiple admin users can create and edit products without the fear of data conflicts.

Product Manager Interface

Creating or editing a product detail has never been faster with the new arrangement of the product fields in the product manager interface.

 

 

Frontend development : New Default Theme

Magento 2 platform brings new default theme, codename “Luma”, which is really an eye-catching theme that has some substantial changes compared to previous version – Madison Island theme. The new theme includes tiles structure, typography, fully responsive images and better performance.

It is a very helpful feature in Magento 2 for the frontend developers. It reduces their burden in developing the theme. It offers a stripped down version of the theme to the developers. Then they can customize the theme as per the requirements in their projects.

 

New layout elements

Magento 2 supports the concept of container wrapper in its new version. A container can contain blocks, other containers and render all children. With the Visual Design editor, organizing blocks will now be more intuitive by just moving the blocks around and easily defining the sections of the layout in a clearer way.

New Structure

Magento 2 file structure slightly varies from Magento 1. There are 2 changes in the file structure of Magento 2 compared with Magento 1.They are

• Every file is placed under the app folder.
• Each module has its own VIEW directory in which you can access all template, layout, css and js files. It would be very helpful for the developers to customise the modules without modifying the core files.

Magento 2 introduces 4 new file directories. They are

• Primary directories
• System directories
• Application directories
• Public directories

The primary directories cannot be changed. They include: base directory, code directory/app/code, lib directory/lib.
The system directories include: DI directory /var/di, generation directory /var/generation, etc directory /app/etc. To change the location of the system directory, you need to run EntryPoint class:

$result = $entryPoint->run('Magento\App\Http', array(
'app_dirs' => array(
DirectoryList::MEDIA => array(
'path' => 'pub/media.test',
'uri' => 'pub/media'
)
)
));
$result = $entryPoint->run('Magento\App\Http', array(
'app_dirs' => array(
DirectoryList::MEDIA => array(
'path' => 'pub/media.test',
'uri' => 'pub/media'
)
)
));

The application directories include:

app directory /app/code, design directory /app/design, var directory /var, temporary directory /var/tmp, cache directory /var/cache), log directory/var/log, session directory /var/session, systmp directory sys_get_temp_dir().

The public directories include:

pub directory /pub, pub_lib directory /pub/lib, media directory/pub/media, upload directory /pub/upload, static directory /pub/static, pub_view_cache directory/pub/cache.

CSS Preprocessing

Magento 2 does not use Bootstrap but uses its own LESS and CSS in the theme core. It has the publisher to find and publish CSS together with other view static files placed under the pub/ directory. The publisher also supports pre-processing of files being published by using some pre-processors. The CSS pre-processor, for example, consists two independent pre-processors as below:

• LESS pre-processor: Together with LESS PHP adapter, LESS pre-processor enables the use of LESS in Magento.
• CSS URL resolver: This serves to resolve links found in CSS source files using the publisher and replaces them with the correct ones.

No more Prototypes

At first, prototype was used as the main javascript library of Magento because jQuery was not stable enough. However, as the demand from the Magento Community increased, jQuery has now replaced prototype. However, prototype is still included with Magento 2. Magento 2.0’s only support for one Javascript framework means that there will be less Javascript conflicts in 2.0 than in 1.x.

Under the hood

 

Magento UI Library

Magento 2 UI Library is a flexible modular Magento frontend library that employs a set of mixins for base elements and helps to ease frontend theme development and customization. Below are some of its key characteristics:

• Built on LESS pre-processor
• Focused on web standards
• Customizable
• Easy to maintain
• Responsive
• Accessible

Magento 2 SEO features

Magento was SEO friendly from the very beginning: some features were available out-of-the-box, others could be easily implemented via third-party extensions, but every version of this powerful eCommerce platform provides more and more default SEO capabilities.

Magento 2 allows setting meta description, meta keywords and title of a product dynamically. With Magento 2 you can define product meta tags in association with the aid of available product attributes and predefined templates. Product Fields Auto-Generation feature simplifies editing meta elements for each and every product and it is a real breakthrough as earlier it was a real problem for big stores with thousands of products.

Another really notable improvement in Magento 2 SEO is availability to edit robots.txt file directly from the Admin panel.

Magento 2 allows adding XML Sitemap to a robots.txt automatically.

Out-of-the-box version of Magento 2 allows to apply labels to product images.

Conclusion

It’s clear that this platform was designed and developed to provide a better experience for customers and admin. It maintains the flexibility and adds some important, useful features. The new version is scalable as businesses grows. It is fast with a streamlined checkout process to increase conversions and encourage repeat customers.

References

15 amazing key updates & exciting features of Magento 2.0

15 amazing key updates & exciting features of Magento 2.0

https://www.quora.com/https://www.ubertheme.com/magento-news/11-exciting-features-magento-2/

https://eltrino.com/blog/Magento-2-SEO-features-exploration