After the success of Magento 1 over the years, many different versions of Magento were released and the final version of Magento 1.x was released 1.9.0.1. Each version has its own outstanding features and bug fixes.
After a period time of study, Magento 2.0 Release Candidate (RC) debuted to the Magento developer community on November 17, 2014. It was born to reach the expectation of merchants, partners and developers as well. Magento 2 allows users can create their eCommerce website quickly, download easily and open a huge community to share knowledge about its excellence.
Also, when compared to the previous version, Magento2 is a technology upgrade, directory structure change, change architecture, change backend and also improved platform interface to support the mobile version.
So, what differences between Magento 1 and Magento 2 that make a lot of users want to upgrade to? One you have to do is to follow this article below:
1. Technology Improvement
Magento 2.0 will be using the latest and the most versions of PHP, particularly 5.4 and 5.5, HTML5, CSS 3.3 and the most recent versions of JQuery.
With the help of innovative technologies, it will achieve improved performance, more security features. System requirements are:
a. H.P 5.4 + with these following extensions:
- PDO / MySQL
- MySQLi
- mbstring
- Mcrypt
- mhash
- SimpleXML
- DOM (this is included by default in PHP 5.4)
- curl
- GD2 or ImageMagick 6.3.7 (or later) or both
- soap
b. Mysql version 5.6
c. Zend Framework 1.x
d. Javascript: jQuery
e. HTML5 and CSS3
In addition, Magento 2 developer teams also focus on improving the quality code. The test frameworks integrated with magento 2 are as follows:
- Integration Testing (framework)
- Unit Testing
- Static Testing
- Performance Testing
- JavaScript Testing
2. Easy to customize
With the precious version of Magento, of course Magento 1.x, you need to have some technical skills for layout manipulations. This task is so very clear and easier for almost users of Magento 2, even you are a newbies.
With the new Visual Design Editor, the management of the design will be much simpler than before. This feature, with its easy-to-use “drag and drop” interface, will allow people to sell modified blocks and containers without significant effort.
3. Checkout process optimzation
Do you think the checkout process is important?
Yes, of course. If a customer has to wait for a long time to check out, maybe they will either leave your store, or they will not come back. It is absolutely true. According to a new report from Harris Interface, 47% of shoppers gave up a purchase because checkout process takes too long.
Diffenrent from the precious version, Magento 2.x offers highly optimized and simplified checkout process. It means that you can have more buyers visit and stay on your online store.
4. Change the directory structure
Magento 2 will decrease the number of root directories from 9 to 5 to make store management quickly.
- Moved js, media, skin from root to PUB folder
- Another one is dev, which contains tools for conversion and testing
To make it easy to understand, I have an example. The new folder “pub” will contain all the data available to the public. This system is more convenient than before, in which many files were divided into “media”, “error”, “skin”, “js”. In addition, store owners will be able to place their Magento application files outside of the web document root.
5. More mobile – friendly
Google reports show up to 20% of users search on mobile. It means if your website displays well on the mobile, you will have a big competitive advantage.
Magento 2 has improved the mobile friendliness of your website. It comes with new responsively designed (and SEO-friendly) themes.
Above are 5 key points of them. Because of those advantages, a lot of users tend to upgrade to Magento 2. In this case, you can follow three steps below:
- Step 1: Enable maintenance mode and Backup Database
- Step 2: Upgrade database and file structure system to point to the new version of Magento.
- Step 3: Move the themes and custom extensions.
- Step 4: Double check to make sure the upgrade has no error.
If you have any question, please contact us for further information!
