Magento 2.4.0

Hi everyone and welcome back to another edition of

the Hussey Coding blog

Recently Magento released their 2.4 updates and so in today's blog we'll be taking a quick look at the new, the old and what that means for you.

Firstly you need to know that this is not comprehensive coverage of all that is contained within the release notes rather an overview of them. There is so much in these release notes it would take a long time to cover it all and of late Magento are throwing these updates out faster than a Cowboy through a saloon window.

Together with new features being introduced and old ones being shown the door, there were a TON of fixes in this update! In fact, 70-75% of all the M2.4 updates are for fixing the platform. And so we are going to tackle them in next weeks blog and lastly when you see this symbol "*" this indicates that the features mentioned are for M2 Commerce edition only. With all that said it's time to dive into ...

There are over 30 security fixes and improvements in this release, including two-factor authentication for all admin accounts as a requirement. This is awesome! The admin panel is the heart of your store/business is when it comes to Magento so, the more security you have, the better. And what's brilliant about this is that it's mandatory, you cannot turn this off in the settings or disable it in any other way. Though it is optional for regular Magento accounts we would recommend, as a house rule, you make it mandatory for those accounts too.

There's also some new multi-factor authentication that has been added to cloud SSH access on Magento Commerce Cloud. Unlike the two-factored authentication on the admin panel, this is not the default so you will need to go and turn it on manually for each project.

Speaking of defaults, Elasticsearch 7.6 is now Magento's default catalogue search engine for both open source and Commerce editions. This means that when you upgrade to M2.4, you will automatically install Elasticsearch 7.6x which now also supports the partial word feature previously seen in MySQL. Elasticsearch 5.x and 6.x are no longer supported and, Elasticsearch 2.x has been completely removed along with the MySQL catalogue search engine.

PHP 7.4 and PHPUnit9.x have been introduced, and all extensions in the Magento marketplace now need to confirm that they are compatible. PHP 7.1 and 7.2 along with PHPUnit 6.5 are on their way out after having been depreciated. With this in mind, you should check your installed extensions to avoid any loss of service, issues or downtime. Page Builder* now also supports PHP 7.4.

A new feature to be introduced in M2.4 is seller-assisted shopping. This new feature allows the admin to log into customer accounts on their behalf to help with things like order placements, troubleshooting and whatever else they may need. All sessions where the admin has logged in will be destroyed once the admin logs out and, they have no access to customer passwords. On its own, this feature is exciting. However, coupled with the fact that it was firstly a community extension that is now part of the core code makes it even more special and noteworthy.

Finding Adobe stock preview images in the media gallery using Adobe's stock integration v2.0 makes it easier than ever for you to license stock preview images. The media gallery its self has received an update now working up to 30X faster than it did before. It's worth bearing in mind that extensions made before M2.4 may not work with the new media gallery so remember to check any extensions you may have. The new stock integration also brings with it some inventory management enhancements that support features like in-store pickup, product bundles and updates to GraphQL and PWA studio. 

Other enhancements include things like making Template filter strict mode mandatory, disabling Data rendering for UI data providers, improved MySQL 8.0 which in turn allows merchants to deploy MariaDB 10.4 (Magento recommend that you update to both MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB 10.4 due to their superior improvements over past incarnations), the Zend Framework dependencies migration to the Laminas project in preparation for the complete removal of Zend, a 25-30% improvement to quick add-to-cart performance, improvements to the B2B order approval workflow* and overall improvements to Amazon pay, dotdigital*, Braintree payments, Klarna, Vertex and Yotpo extensions.

It's also important to note that the following have all been removed from the core code, Signifyd fraud protection, Braintree module Authorize.Net, eWay*, CyberSource* and Worldpay payment*.

For the full rundown of what M2.4 has to offer, check out the release notes here

- M2.4 release notes

Thank you for taking the time to join us today and watch out next week for part 2 of our M2.4 update overview. Until then, stay safe and have a great day.

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