Good news for all Magento 2 merchants and developers: Magento 2.3.1 has just been released today – on March 26, 2019, with an impressive boost on performance and security. Also, the latest Magento version brings about remarkable improvements to the Magento core with a wide range of bug fixes.
Here is what Magento says about the release:
This release includes over 200 functional fixes to the core product, over 500 pull requests contributed by the community, and over 30 security enhancements.
Magento 2.3.1 Essential Highlights
Here’s a quick run-through of the new updates that were added to Magento 2.3.1:
1. Improved Merchant Experience
- Enhancing the flow of creating orders on the back-end: no more delays for billing and shipping address edits.
- Uploading large PDP images without compression and downsizing
- Adding more features to Inventory Management: supported Elasticsearch, enabled distance priority source selection algorithm, optimized inventory transfers in mass, and allowed in-store pickup fulfillment.
2. Enhanced Developer Experience
- Upgrading dependencies automatically by a new composer
- Improving Progressive Web Apps Studio
- Adding more features to GraphQL: cart creation, shipping address setup, and customer account creation.
3. 30 Security Enhancements
There are a lot of security enhancements related to:
- Cross-site scripting
- Arbitrary code execution
- Sensitive data disclosure
4. Boosted Site Performance
- Rewriting customer addresses with UI components in order to manage a large number of customers’ addresses more effectively.
- Showing multiple customer addresses in the customer address book (frontend) as a grid.
- Keeping the entered shipping and billing data during checkout even when the customers delay checkout to continue shopping.
5. Promoted Infrastructure
- Replacing the Authorize.Net Direct Post module bynew Authorize.Net extension.
- Applying Accept.js library for Authorize.NET payments.
- Supporting Elasticsearch 6.0, Redis 5.0, PHP 7.2.x (certified on PHP 7.2.11).
- Updating PayPal Express Checkout to checkout.js v4.
- Extracting MySQL Views from regular database tables without impacts on backing up and restoring data.
- Using DHL XML 6.0 for the DHL shipping method.
- Remaining checkout information after the customers updates their cart.
- Upgrading to Magento Functional Test Framework 2.3.13.
6. Enhanced Bundled Extensions
- Amazon Pay: Supported multiple currencies for EU and UK stores.
- Rebranding dotmailer to dotdigital Engagement Cloud and adding new features related to enabled marketing preferences (on customer account dashboard), changing customer consent text to general subscription text, retry function for pending contacts.
- Adding and improving features for Magento Shipping: be able to cancel the shipment, access shipping portal via Magento, add error messages and field validation to batch processing workflow, expand available collection points, add carrier-specific packaging to FedEx, restructure qualification experiences, apply cart price rules, etc.
- Vertex: Supported B2C VAT and configurable logging.
Should We Upgrade To Magento 2.3.1 Now?
As we all know, Magento 2.3.1 goes with a number of significant changes that can make some preinstalled extensions on your website not work properly. Therefore, it might be a good idea to wait for the module providers to check the compatibility and update their products before starting your upgrade.
Moreover, before upgrading to Magento 2.3.1, you need to make sure that your site meets all the basic requirements. There are some notes related to the operating systems, memory, composer, web server, PHP, SSL, mail server, and so on. Furthermore, if your current theme is not compatible with Magento 2.3.1, you should consider replacing it with a new one. For example, B.Geek is the latest Magento 2.3.x theme (for both Magento 2.3.0 & 2.3.1), which would be a great choice for your online store.
Last but not least, in the previous blog post, we advised you to upgrade to Magento 2.2.7 instead of Magento 2.3.0. The reason was that at that time, Magento 2.3.0 was very unstable. However, the latest Magento 2.3.1 version has totally changed our minds. It’s worth your try!
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