All You Need to Know About Magento 2

Magento 2 is now developing swiftly and it attracts company’s attention thanks to promotion among developers, which should take the opportunities to extent Magento 2 in the market. The turn of merchants will go right after and closer to the Merchant beta release.

However, it is clear that the whole Community has prepared understanding of the new platform to get ready to meet Magento 2 fully equipped. In the first step, we’ll try to collect some basic facts about Magento 2 and everything relating to it.

Magento 2 Tasks

The process of Magento 2 development is explicit for all members of the community and we greatly appreciate it. In line with this principle the Magento 2 team declared the main goals of the current enhancement.

• Update the technology stack;
• Simplify external integrations;
• Improve performance and scalability;
• Streamline the customization process;
• Enable easier installations and upgrades;
• Deliver better quality, testing resources, and documentation.

Form those advantages; we can totally believe that Magento 2 will be an innovative product able to satisfy the requirements of developers and merchants in a good manner.

Magento 2 in Google Trends

The popularity of Magento 2 is rising constantly in Google Trends over the time since 2009, as it is shown on the picture below. Lately Magento 2 reached the peak of popularity in December 2014, and April 2015.

Magento 2 Google Trend. Source: https://www.google.by/trends/

However, Magento 2 gets 100 times less queries is still far from Magento, the popularity of the most famous ecommerce platform worldwidem Magento is very popular in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, etc., while Magento 2 is mostly searched from India, United Kingdom, Germany, and United States. Presumably, this interest is coming from the developers and merchants considered to migrate from Magento to Magento 2.

Magento vs. Magento 2. Source: https://www.google.by/trends/

So, we understand that Magento 2 is still go on the right track, but still needs to improve some things to be done to replace Magento 1.x as the best global ecommerce platform.

Magento Regional Interest. Source: https://www.google.by/trends/

Magento 2 Regional Interest. Source: https://www.google.by/trends/

Magento 2 Most Popular Keywords

According to Google, the profile of Magento 2 related searches during the last 12 month is the following:

• magento 2 demo — 390 searches;
• magento 2 release — 140 searches;
• magento 2 features — 90 searches;
• magento 2 roadmap — 70 searches;
• Download magento 2–70 searches;
• magento 2 tutorial — 50 searches;
• magento 2 webinar — 40 searches;
• magento 2 installation — 10 searches;
• magento 2 requirements — 10 searches

So, following your interests, we’ll make our attempt to find several valuable online resources relevant to most popular Magento 2 keywords. And, going along with the popularity, Magento 2 demo will be the next destination.

Keyword 1: Magento 2 Demo

With the desire for touching the new functionality, it is no doubt that “magento 2 demo” is the most popular query. In Google, the keyword results in several provided Magento 2 based demos, but we liked the one from Firebear Studio. It is really well designed and contains necessary explanations of the differences between Magento and Magento 2, which are not immediately clear from the frontend.

In the next part of this post we’ll explain the main advantages and improvements added to Magento 2.

Keyword 2: Magento 2 Release (Magento 2 Roadmap)

The second thing most users are wondering is about the way Magento 2 release schedule and how it works.

It was announced at Imagine 2015 that Magento follows the schedule, which is good news for all of us. Let us remind you the milestones.

So, at the end of this year we are looking forward for the Merchant General Availability release

Magento 2 Schedule. Source: Magento.com

Keyword 3: Magento 2 Requirements.

• Operating systems: Linux distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, and so on
• Composer (latest stable version)
• Apache 2.2 or later
• PHP 5.5.x or 5.6.x
• Required PHP extensions:PDO/MySQL, Mbstring, Mcrypt, Mhash, Simplexml, Curl, gd2, ImageMagick 6.3.7 (or later) or both, soap, intl
• MySQL 5.6.x
• Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) or an SMTP server
• Optional but recommended: * 2.0 or later (development environments only; can have an adverse effect on performance) * PHPUnit (as a command-line tool) 4.1 or later

Keyword 4: Magento 2 Features

The differences between two Magento platform generations are diẻctly reflected in Magento 2 features.

Structure

The structure of Magento 2 differs clearly as follow: initially, now everything is putted under the app folder and, secondly, every module has its own directory view. This makes customizations much easier, as developers do not longer need to change the core files of the platform.

CSS Processing

Magento 2 uses the LESS CSS pre-processor; therefore, developers enjoy new added opportunities and easier and faster to changes code and maintenance.

Simple Integration with External Systems

Using enhanced APIs Magento 2 simplifies the process of integration with external systems and makes it possible to return the object (order, customer, etc) associated data in one call.

Magento UI Library

Magento UI Library is a set of generic web components and Magento 2 specific patterns, which simplifies the process of Magento theme creation and customization.

Blank Theme

The blank theme without specific customizations allows developers to easily design theme in their own style by adding features and customizations.

• Improved Performance and Scalability
• With the purposes to provide better performance and scalability Magento 2 currently includes:
• Improved indexers — new indexers with the faster query performance;
• Magento performance toolkit — set of performance test scripts;
• Varnish — out-of-the-box integration with Varnish cache;
• Full page caching — cached content of static pages;
• Multiple admin users.

Reduced upgrade and installation efforts

Magento 2 contains the information related to versioning policies and compatibility of upgrades with current versions, which allows developers to predict upcoming changes and consider them in their customizations.

It also includes a standalone installer, which supports fast and smart installations with preliminary checks of the installation environment.

Magento 2 is also greatly adapted for extension installations and upgrading procedures.

Testing Framework

The testing framework of Magento 2 includes tests for integrations, units, static environments, functional areas, and performance that improves testing and fastens development.

Keyword 5: Download Magento 2 (Magento 2 installation)

You can download Magento on GitHub and find here a comprehensive description of the installation process.

Keyword 6: Magento 2 Tutorial

The main source of all Magento 2 related documents is magento.com, which contains development documentation, changelogs, videos, blogs, etc., and the corresponding page on GitHub.

Conclusion

All things mentioned above are the most popular Google search queries related to Magento 2. Naturally, Magento 2 is already much bigger than one blog post and much more multi-faceted; therefore, in order to better cover this very important for us subject, we are starting a series of articles about Magento 2 and its progress in the conquest of the ecommerce world.