Magento 2.2.6 Release: Is It Worth Our Expectations?

magento 2.2.6

On a quarterly basis, Magento releases a new version of Magento 2 with a lot of improvements and enhancements. The latest version up to now is Magento 2.2.6, which has been released on September 18, 2018. Similar to the previous versions, Magento 2.2.6 comes up with a wide range of security enhancements (25), bugs fixed (150), and pull requests submitted by the Magento community (350+). It seems that Magento focuses most on adding new features and enhancements to previous versions while concentrating more on the security issues of Magento 2.2.6. They emphasize the importance of security to an e-commerce website and highly recommend all stores to upgrade to this latest version, in order to avoid the risk of losing customer information or admin control.

Let’s take a look at some highlights in Magento 2.2.6:

Code

  • Improved catalog indexing performance: Optimizing the logic and flow of category product indexer and declining the time for re-indexing by nearly 100%. Optimizing the process of catalog rule re-indexing and decreasing the time of re-indexing by 80%. Limiting the catalog price indexer to boost the search, layered navigation performance. Reducing the time of loading category and products pages of multi-attribute items. Cutting down the time of loading multi-category home page. Allowing disabling Magento Reports to enhance the overall performance.
  • Enhanced checkout process: Remaining items on the cart regardless of multi-reloaded checkout page. Remaining shipping address (guest checkout) even when refreshing the checkout page. Adding various shipping methods without affecting checkout speed.
  • Effective configurable product sorting by price: Removing out-of-stock items and disabled child products from the search results.
  • No duplicated delete requests: Handling the issue of deleting products in mass due to weak Internet connection.

Magento Cloud

  • Adding Docker Compose configuration to the Cloud ece-tools repository.
  • Altering store locales without exporting and importing configuration.
  • Adding a robots.txt file and generating a sitemap for a single domain configuration without infrastructure change.
  • Determining various locales per theme by using the SCD_MATRIX environment variable.
  • Ensuring smooth buying experience during deployments involving changes in the database schema.
  • Starting the post_deploy phase right after finishing the deploy phase.

Community Contribution

  • Facilitating order completion even when it includes a configurable product with a deleted option after adding the product to cart.
  • Maintaining the default sort order “newest first” when upgrading Magento deployment.
  • Easily changing the setting for a store view’s theme.
  • Loading pages faster thanks to product taxes calculation removal when loading the category pages.

Bundle Extensions

  • Amazon Pay Enhancements: Allowing integrating website with payment provider by using Magento payment provider gateway. Working smoothly with virtual goods. Showing Amazon Pay in the payment options list.
  • Dotmailer: Capturing customers’ consent owing to Consent Insight. Importing contacts of subscribers only. Getting a warning before synchronizing non-subscribers into account.
  • Klarna: Embedding a link to automated onboarding and account sign-in in the payment section. Notifying the admin of fraudulent orders cancels those orders automatically. Including shipping and discount orders to order management calls. Discarding hard code of payment method names and logos.
  • Magento Shipping: Offering Click & Collect shipping option, that allows collecting shipments from indicated store locations. Adding Batch Processing feature, allowing modifying order packages/ booking shipment/ printing packing slips and labels for a batch. Providing Shipment Reference field to connect bookings between customers and carriers.
  • Magento Social: Removing Magento Social Facebook extension.

Apart from this, there are up to 150 functional fixes related to installation, setup and deployment, CAPTCHA, cleanup, CMS page content, cookies, customer account, directory, EAV, dashboard, gift cards, HTML, JavaScript, newsletters, page cache, sale rules, testing, swatches, translation, URL rewrites, wishlist, and so on. Download Magento 2.2.6 Open Source here.

Conclusion

It’s undoubted that Magento 2 has been becoming better day by day, in all terms of an e-commerce website, from interface, performance, security to user experience. While a lot of improvements have been made for Magento 2, we see just a few security fixes for Magento 1. Particularly, the latest Magento 1.9.3.10 addresses 2 main issues related to cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery. Moreover, Magento officially announced that they will no longer provide security patches for Magento 1 from June 2020. Therefore, all Magento store owners should consider upgrading to Magento 2 as soon as possible. With more than 5 years of experience in Magento development, Tigren is one of the first choice when it comes to Magento migration service.

Contact us now to get a free and fast quotation for Magento migration and other services. We will help you to migrate from Magento 1 to the latest Magento 2.2.6 version successfully while investing just an affordable cost.  

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