What's new in Magento 2
If you currently use or have previously used a Magento 1.x store, you'll notice that many things look different in Magento 2. Throughout this book, you'll note from various screenshots that the backend interface is easier to use and rich in new operations features. We'll explore these in later chapters.
While the new UI is pretty slick, it's the under-the-hood improvements that you'll come to truly appreciate in your Magento store. Magento has long been challenged by a lack of speed. Even on servers and systems specifically tuned for Magento, heavy traffic from online visitors, large backend operations (for example, importing, reports, and so on), and inherent code bottlenecks have made many Magento stores slower performers than similar stores on other platforms. At times, it's even made us step back and compare the benefits of Magento against other platforms, although we keep coming back to Magento due to its unique features.
The Magento team focused considerable energy in making Magento faster. At the expense of getting too "geeky", let's explore some of the most important improvements:
- To improve scalability (which is the ability to increase resources during heavier traffic loads), Magento now includes full page caching as part of Community Edition. Caching reduces the number of operations needed to render a web page to your visitor, greatly improving user experience.
- The "rearchitecture" of the entire system has truly improved code efficiency. This work also helps developers by making the code simpler and more accessible.
- Magento 2 uses the latest HTML 5 and CSS 3 code frameworks optimized for modern browsers. In addition, CSS code can be more efficiently built in SASS and "preprocessed" by Magento. For theme designers, these features help create more mobile-ready designs that give your visitors a much richer shopping experience.
- Upgrades and add-ons are easier to use and manage. Magento is creating an extension verification program as well to validate new add-ons. There will be no more buying of third-party add-ons that break a Magento store due to poor coding.