Hello, Magento Folks?
Magento has released the Major upgrades of its next version, and we are going to explain what new features and improvements have been included with this upgrade.
As per the norm set for quarterly release by the Adobe owned Magento, it has released the latest upgrade of the Magento 2, which is Magento 2.3.4
Magento Open source, formerly known as Community Edition and Magento Commerce, formerly known as Enterprise Edition, has significant platform upgrades and security changes. Also, it is more compatible with the PSD2 – compliant core payment methods.
As per the Release Note of Magento 2.3.4 published on Magento website, this version upgrade includes more than 220 functional fixes of the core product and more than 30 enhanced security updates. Magento has resolved more than 275 contributions made by its enriching community members like developers and agencies. Magento did minor core code clean-up to major performance enhancement to inventory management and GraphQL.
So, let’s dive into what new features and performance improvements are available in Magento 2.3.4
Major Security Improvements:
This version upgrade includes more than 30 security enhancements.
- These improvements help in the closing of cross-site scripting and remote code execution vulnerabilities. There are no confirmed records for the attack of hackers related to this. Still, Magento identified some vulnerability that can potentially exploit and can get access to the administrative control to access customer information.
- Magento has advised taking appropriate actions such as IP whitelisting, Two-factor authentication, VPN, using a unique solution instead of /admin, and strong password so that attackers are not able to get the full control of your administrative access.
- Also, Magento has performed some fixes to core codes for security purposes. It includes the removal of custom layout updates and layout updates so that remote code execution can be removed.
- Magento has redesigned features of the content template to allow whitelisted variables that can be added in the template.
For more info, read this.
Magento has also provided an option to fix the vulnerabilities identified in its previous version, which is Magento 2.3.3, with a different security patch available as 2.3.3.1(composer packages 2.3.3-p1).
Major Upgrades in the Platform:
Magento has done the below-listed upgrades to enhance website security and PCI compliance.
- Message queue framework is enhanced with the latest released version of 3rd party technology RabbitMQ V3.8.
- Magento 2.3.4 is tried and tested on the latest stable version of Redis V5.0.6, which proves that page caching and session storage capabilities have been improved.
- Magento has improved the support to use declarative schema with both MySQL and MariaDB 10.2
For more info, read this.
Boosts in Performance:
Magento has upgraded the Magento 2.3.4 to provide the following performance enhancements,.
- Customer section invalidation has been refactored, and banner cache logic is improved to eliminate non-cached requests.
- Refactoring of the PHTML files to support parsing by the bundling mechanism.
- Magento, with this release, has turned off by default the statistics collection for reports. You can enable it by going into System Configuration > General > Reports > General Options. For performance reasons, Magento has advised to turn it off when not required.
For more info, read this.
Improvements in Infrastructure:
Magento has improved more than 250 core quality fixes that will enhance the quality of the framework, catalog, sales, PayPal, Elasticsearch, import, CMS, and B2B.
Improvements in Merchant tools:
Magento has integrated a new bundled Adobe stock integration extension that can add high-quality images and videos to the merchant’s website.
Inventory Management enhancements:
The following improvements have been made to enhance the performance of inventory management.
- A known issue involving the shopping cart has been addressed, which causes a higher load on database servers.
- Updated and improved the command for inventory Reservation CLI to lower the memory usage.
- Quality issues related to credit memos, grouped product, source, and stock mass actions have been resolved.
For more info, read this.
Improvements in GraphQL:
Magento, with the release of this version, includes better Graph coverage for search, cart functionality, and layered navigation. It has below listed mutations,
- Ability to link and retrieve cart on different devices.
- Now it is easy for GraphQL users to do price rendering which can be achieved on the storefront with the improved method of returning price.
- Product tax and level discount information issue is fixed.
- The cart now has promotion data.
- Now users can get the category data by name, slug, or ID.
For more info, read this.
So, these were the major improvements of the issues identified by Magento. These significant improvements are available with its latest version upgrade, which is Magento 2.3.4. To know what other fixes Magento has brought, read this official Magento release note for Magento 2.3.4.
The pre-release date is set as Jan 14, 2020, and the General Availability Date is set as Jan 28, 2020. But Magento Commerce customers are able to get the access before two weeks of fixed GA date for 2.3.x and 2.2.x patches. Read more about this official release note of Magento 2.3.4 for Magento Commerce.
Looking forward to the release of Magento Open Source 2.4.4 on April 12, 2022.
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