What is Magento?
Magento Commerce is the leading provider of open omnichannel innovation. Magento open source digital commerce platform and cloud-based omnichannel solutions empower merchants to integrate digital and physical shopping experiences.
Magento is one of the best options and here’s why: In today’s world, where everyone is connected to the web – if you’re not online, the chances are high that your store will remain unknown. Unless you are selling bread and milk, you should probably consider an online store for your products.
Unlike a normal store, an online store gives you great visibility to a very broad range of customers. Online, you can sell locally, nationally and, why not, internationally.
Proprietary Platform
While this solution offers a platform perfectly tailored to your needs without any other bulk and no limitations, this option is usually high-cost, high-maintenance and time-consuming.
If you were to build such a platform, it would take you a good two-to-three months to have it up and somewhat bug-free. If you were to hire someone to do this for you it would cost you somewhere from $3,000 and up, depending on what you want and need.
Open Source
Magento is a free ecommerce platform released under Open Source License ver 3.0 and built using PHP and other open source tools. By using these technologies and remaining open source means that Magento as a platform has several distinct advantages over the competition. The Platform is highly adaptable and could be modified endlessly to exactly fit project requirements.
Using open source tools also means that the platform guarantees a robust performance and enhanced security for merchants and developers.
Custom Designed for Ecommerce
These days all major CMS’s including WordPress, Drupal and others offer ecommerce capabilities (right out of the box in some cases!), they are designed with an ecommerce-only approach.
Thus Magento powered ecommerce solutions offer a better experience to everyone from the developers to the store administrators to end users who come to shop at the storefront. Over years, Magento has evolved into a feature rich ecommerce solution that comes prepackaged with all the essential tools needed to build up an ecommerce web store.
The Magento Community
Where there is an open source app, there is a community!
Since Magento is a very popular open source ecommerce platform, there is a huge community of store owners, merchants, developers, designers, agencies, ecommerce consultants, tech solutions providers, and general end users around the globe who discuss everything Magento in great details. The community ensures that the platform remains up-to-date, fast, reliable, secure and free from bugs. The good thing about this community is the very welcoming nature that makes every newcomer feel right at home.
No Hosting Related Restrictions
Unlike Shopify and Volusion (the “made for ecommerce” platforms), Magento allows you to choose the hosting solution of your choice. This way you could select the best hosting solution provider that fits your requirements and your budget. Similarly, when it is time to migrate your store, there is no restrictions on when and where you could host your store.
Default Responsive Design
The share of mobile devices in global ecommerce transactions is rapidly growing and soon it will surpass all other device classes. Realizing this, Magento incorporates HTML5 capabilities, ensuring that the storefront has a responsive design that caters flawlessly to mobile devices. In addition, Magento offers features such as Griding, image scaling, AV capabilities, gesture controls, drag-and-drop, etc.
Third Party Components Integration
Third party plugins and extensions greatly ease out the lives of Magento store administrators and developers. Magento offers limitless and restriction free integration of all third party components, thereby shortening the development and deployment timeframes considerably.
The good thing is that many of these components are free to use. Others are available for just a couple of dollars.
With the help of extensible API in Magento, you can connect to any application or any plugin of your choice without any hurdles. Whether it’s a payment gateway, an analytics tool or shipping, and tracking method, you only need to find the best extension and plug it into your Magento store within no time.
Magento Extensions & Customization Options
Every industry has its own ecommerce store design conventions. What works for fashion & apparel may not work for a furniture retailer. Similarly size, scale of operations, customer support requirements, billing and delivery options, etc. pose various challenges in the ecommerce environment.
Magento is a highly customizable ecommerce platform. It allows you to develop incredible frontend user experiences by editing layouts and templates or add new colors and styles of your choice. Backend refinements can also be redesigned to fulfill business requirements by rewriting code, modifying events and grids.
One of the key points of interest for all Magento users is the vast marketplace of extensions and modules. Magento users can discover multiple extensions effortlessly to extend and customize their stores and distinguish their storefront from the competitors’ by utilizing different augmentations.
Fast & Scalable
When it comes to page load speed, Magento is a clear winner!
Slow loading online stores go down very quickly. In many cases, the loss from slow pages is permanent and greatly contributes to the demise of the business. Magento with high-end caching technologies such as the Cloudways Full Page Cache and other database optimization techniques such as Memcached and Redis speed up the stores considerably.
Magento is suitable for small to large (and even huge) ecommerce stores simply because it’s flexible enough to grow with your business. In fact, Magento might surprise you with its performance, stability, and reliability.
Multiple Stores
Many ecommerce platforms let you have a single store per account. With Magento, you can setup multiple stores that could be managed through a single backend. You can control stores’ inventory, orders, billing, customer information, using a single admin panel.
Each store can have different themes and templates associated with them. You can also assign a subdomain for individual stores. The ease of controlling all of the stores simultaneously through a single admin panel greatly simplifies management and administration of multi-stores that operate in a single or multiple categories.
What’s New in Magento 2.4.2?
Magento Open Source 2.4.2 introduces enhancements to performance and security plus significant platform improvements. Security enhancements include expansion of support for the SameSite attribute for all cookies. Elasticsearch 7.9.x and Redis 6.x are now supported.
This release includes over 280 new fixes to core code and 35 security enhancements. It includes the resolution of almost 290 GitHub issues by our community members. These community contributions range from minor clean-up of core code to significant enhancements in GraphQL.
All known issues identified in Magento 2.4.1 have been fixed in this release.
Security-only patch available
Merchants can now install time-sensitive security fixes without applying the hundreds of functional fixes and enhancements that a full quarterly release provides (for example, Magento 2.4.1-p1). Patch 2.4.0.12 (Composer package 2.4.1-p1) is a security-only patch that provides fixes for vulnerabilities that have been identified in our previous quarterly release, Magento 2.4.1. All hot fixes that were applied to the 2.4.1 release are included in this security-only patch. (A hot fix provides a fix to a released version of Magento that addresses a specific problem or bug.)
For general information about security-only patches, see the Magento DevBlog post Introducing the New Security-only Patch Release. For instructions on downloading and applying security-only patches (including patch 2.4.1-p1), see Install Magento using Composer. Security-only patches include security bug fixes only, not the additional security enhancements that are included in the full patch.
Other release information
Although code for these features is bundled with quarterly releases of the Magento core code, several of these projects (for example, Progressive Web Applications (PWA) Studio) are also released independently. Bug fixes for these projects are documented in the separate, project-specific release information that is available in the documentation for each project.
Highlights
Look for the following highlights in this release.
Substantial security enhancements
This release includes over 35 security fixes and platform security improvements. All security fixes have been backported to Magento 2.4.1-p1 and Magento 2.3.6-p1.
Over 35 security enhancements that help close remote code execution (RCE) and cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities
No confirmed attacks related to these issues have occurred to date. However, certain vulnerabilities can potentially be exploited to access customer information or take over administrator sessions. Most of these issues require that an attacker first obtains access to the Admin. As a result, we remind you to take all necessary steps to protect your Admin, including but not limited to these efforts: IP allowlisting, two-factor authentication, use of a VPN, the use of a unique location rather than /admin, and good password hygiene. See Adobe Security Bulletin for a discussion of these fixed issues.
Additional security enhancements
Security improvements for this release include:
- All core cookies now support the
SameSiteattribute. - Magento now displays messages that identify potentially malicious content in product and category description fields when the user tries to save values in these fields.
- File system operations across Magento components have been standardized and hardened to prevent malicious uploads.
- Core Content Security Policy (CSP) violations have been fixed.
Infrastructure improvements
This release contains enhancements to core quality, which improve the quality of the Framework and these functional areas: Customer Account, Catalog, CMS, OMS, Import/Export, Promotions and Targeting, and Cart and Checkout.
Platform enhancements
- Elasticsearch 7.9.x is now supported. Although we recommend running Elasticsearch 7.9.x, Magento 2.4.x remains compatible with Elasticsearch 7.4.x.
- Magento 2.4.2 has been tested with Varnish 6.4. Magento 2.4.x remains compatible with Varnish 6.x.
- Redis 6.x is now supported. Magento 2.4.x remains compatible with Redis 5.x.
- Magento 2.4.2 is now compatible with Composer 2.x. We recommend that merchants migrate to Composer 2.x. Although you can install this release using Composer 1.x, Composer 1.x will soon reach end-of-life. For an overview of Composer 2.x features, see Composer 2.0 is now available!
The ability to configure a Magento installation to use a split database has been deprecated in this release. Merchants who currently use split database should start planning to revert to or migrate to a single database or use an alternative approach. See the Deprecation of split database functionality in Magento Commerce DevBlog post for an overview of this issue. See Revert from a split database to a single database for migration instructions.
Performance enhancements
This release includes code enhancements that boost API performance and Admin response time for deployments with large catalogs. Multiple scalability enhancements enable Magento 2.4.2 to natively support complex catalogs up to 20x larger than in previous releases.
Adobe Stock Integration
This release includes Adobe Stock Integration v2.1.1.
GraphQL
This release adds GraphQL coverage for the following features:
- Added support for comparison lists. Shoppers can create and delete comparison lists, and add and remove items to the comparison lists. In addition, shoppers that create a compare list as a guest can log in as a customer and retain their comparison lists.
- Added the
generateCustomerTokenAsAdminmutation and updated theCustomerobject to support remote purchasing assistance. - Added localization support across stores to support tasks such as changing languages, carts, and currencies.
- Added support for unions in Magento GraphQL. GitHub-29425
- The GraphQL schema has been enhanced to optimize product data retrieval for configurable products with many variants.
- Integer type object IDs have been deprecated in favor of
uidattributes of type ID. - Added the
stagingattribute to theProductInterfaceandCategoryInterfaceto determine if a product is staged and to view its associated campaign information.
See the GraphQL Developer Guide for details on these enhancements.
PWA Studio
This release of PWA Studio includes:
- Internationalization and localization. Venia now provides support for multiple languages and currencies.
- Improved extensibility framework to support code changes through extensions.
- Initial components for My Account related features such as Wishlist, Saved Payments, Address Book, and Order History.
- Various performance optimizations and bug fixes.
For information about enhancements and bug fixes, see PWA Studio releases. See Magento compatibility for a list of PWA Studio versions and their compatible Magento core versions.
Media Gallery
New Role Resources for Media Gallery. This release provides merchants the ability to limit administrator access to only the Media gallery and to control who can perform these actions:
- Insert media assets into content
- Upload assets
- Edit assets details
- Delete assets from the Media Gallery
- Manage folder structure.
Web-optimized images in content. Merchants can now use web-optimized image rendition in content instead of high resolution images. The original image remains unmodified in the Media Gallery, and the image rendition is dynamically generated when the image is inserted in the content.
Magento Functional Testing Framework (MFTF)
MFTF 3.2.1 is now available. This release introduces error tolerance in both tests and test suite generation. Additional enhancements and bug fixes are described in the Magento Functional Testing Framework Changelog.
Vendor Developed Extensions
See the following articles for updates on features and changes for this release:
- Amazon Pay
- Braintree
- dotdigital Engagement Cloud
- Klarna
- Vertex Cloud
- Yotpo Product Reviews
AWS S3 support enhancements
Amazon Simple Storage Service (AWS S3) support has been enhanced to include support for:
- Object storage and future extensibility
- Storing media files on AWS S3
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Magento is the world’s leading e-commerce platform
Magento is a feature-rich, professional open-source eCommerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Magento’s powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalog-management tools give merchants the power to create ecommerce sites that are tailored to their unique business needs.
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Freedom To Choose Hosting Service
Unlike other ‘made for e-commerce’ platforms like Shopify or Volusion, Magento allows you to pick the hosting service you want. This keeps your costs down and offers you the flexibility of switching hosting services if you run into problems with your existing one.
If you still need the convenience of a hosted platform, Magento Go offers you exactly that along with all the benefits that come with the Magento Community edition platform.
Magento Does Not Penalize You For Growing Bigger
One of the main complaints from users of other e-commerce platforms is the incremental cost that comes with every little feature that is added to the site. With Magento being open source, that issue is a complete non-issue. Add as many features as you want to your site, without spending a dime.
Expand and grow as much as you like, and Magento will grow with you at no additional expense.
Easy To Integrate Third Party Apps
Magento’s extensible API allows you to connect to any kind of app or plugin of your choice extremely easily. So be it payment gateways, web analytics or shipping and tracking; find the app of your choice and plug it into your Magento site with in no time.
