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Magento 2.0: What it Means for Developers and Merchants

Written by Mark Konigsmark | Nov 23, 2015 3:49:04 PM

On Tuesday, November 17, 2015, Magento held their user conference, MagentoLive Austrailia 2015, in Australia. You may have caught a few bits of the news on Twitter under hashtag #MLAU15, but in case you missed the full newsreel, we’ve got you covered. The #dropmic news is that Magento announced the general availability of a next generation open source digital commerce platform, Magento 2.0. This is exciting news for all of us in the eCommerce industry as it is critically important to stay ahead of today’s omnichannel shopping experience, and we wanted to uncover the implications for both developers and merchants.

Highlights from the keynote we gleaned for you:

  • Magento Enterprise Edition 2.0 and Magento Community Edition 2.0 are now available providing enhanced performance and scalability. What also catches our eye are the new features to boost conversion rates (I mean, who doesn’t want fewer abandoned carts?) – more on this later.
  • Updated APIs that allow Magento 2.0 stores to more efficiently connect to any third party solution. Long known for being advocates of partners and developers, Magento is now providing merchants with easier customization, faster time to market and flexibility on deployment as well as work through any third party solution. Being able to quickly and affordably leverage turnkey extensions to enhance your store is certainly music to our ears.
  • A new Admin Panel, responsive design reference themes and support for integrated video sends the message that Magento 2.0 is a platform for the advanced consumer shopping experience.
  • Last, but certainly not least, one notable aspect of this new platform is the tight, out-of-the-box integrations with PayPal, Braintree and Authorize.Net payment gateways. New to the 2.0 version are integrations with WorldPay and CyberSource.

 

We sat down with our team at Springbot that works specifically with our Magento integration to hear their interpretation of the Magento 2.0 announcement. The springbots’ shared their point-of-view on what Magento 2.0 means for both developers and eCommerce marketers:

  • Magento is using industry standards for the new release so that means developer skills on platforms like Drupal and Laravel will now easily translate to this new platform. That is a win for the developer and merchant as the process for building a store will be cleaner and, in the long run, more efficient.
  • Out-of-the-box features that we think are cool:
    • Responsive Design: Themes for Magento 2.0 are automatically outfitted to be responsive (which is crucial in today’s mobile-centric perusing and shopping).
    • Simpler Catalog Management: The admin panel now includes a drag-and-drop feature to build a catalog (versus currently doing a single file upload)
    • Cleaner Themes: The default theme starts super clean so it makes it even easier to create your own theme (or customize existing ones). From a developer’s point-of-view, the development extensions and new themes will make it easier to migrate an existing merchant to the new 2.0 platform.

 

Here is a social roll call of what industry leaders are saying about the new platform:

Alan Kent, Chief Architect at Magento

Ben Marks, Magento Solution Specialist


Joshua Warren, Magento-certified developer and CEO of Creatuity

Sherrie Rohde, Community Manager at Magento


Phil Winkle, Magento-certified developer and co-host of Magetalk (you can feel the excitement in the sheer volume of exclamation points!!)


Interested in learning more? Check out these links for more great resources provided by Magento:

  • Product information including videos and white papers are available on the Magento Enterprise Edition page.
  • Early adopters are so helpful to us all – particularly ones willing to share their experience. Take a look at some of the merchants already deployed on Magento 2.0. Two that really caught our eye are Venroy, a high end boutique for men’s beach fashion, and Cultcha Kids that sells Star Wars bobbleheads (need we say more?).
  • Here is the inaugural group of Magento 2 Trained Solution Partners – it is always good to know a trusted set of companies to turn to when you are ready to start your project.
  • Want to get Magento 2.0 trained? Here is as link to the online module to get certified. We hope to see Magento 2.0 certification for individual developers in the future as well!

We’ve taken all of these things about into consideration, and we’re excited to see what the first generation of Magento 2.0 merchants discover. The springbots are following the new platform advancements closely and will keep you updated about it here on the blog.
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