With the official news of Magento 2 being launched in the market doing the round in 2015, it is but obvious that speculations would rise among eCommerce store owners about whether to upgrade to the new version or not. Both for store owners as well as developers, the question is how different the new Magento is and what to expect? And what’s exactly new about the latest version of Magento?
It has been assumed that the newer version of Magento will include these features:
– The new rapid version of Magento is supposed to boost and improve the eCommerce business. Packed with extended features and functionality, the new version will improve performance and scalability.
– It is a lot faster, with updated products and the admin area is a lot easier to use. But the settings in the new version is not yet been worked out.
– Magento professionals opine that from a developer’s or merchant’s point of view, the new version includes many modern design themes which make customizing and extending the platform much simpler.
– The new admin design and user interface is more user-friendly and has been upgraded a little. The new version is more feature-rich platform and uses composer for managing packages or updates.
Developers are advising not to consider upgrading Magento until 2016 as being a more feature-rich platform; the new version will probably take some work and time. While logically, the migrating from Magento 1.x to Magento 2.0 before the year ends is not a good decision as it’s Christmas this time of the year which means your eCommerce store would be preparing for the year-end sale.
However, with Christmas and New Year round the corner, it is also unlikely for the Magento store owners to shift to the newer version. Thankfully, the current version of Magento will be officially supported for 3 more years. Second of all, online store owners, who are currently working with Magento, have become used to the current version and the backend. Therefore, it will take some time to get used to the newer version of Magento. This will further postpone the migration.
Also, to migrate to the new version will require a complete network. Till now, there are no clear paths or resources available to perform an upgrade of the new version as yet. Even, importing in the new version is yet not available. As the path from 1.9.X to the new 2.0 version is yet not clear, the extensions will have to be transferred and it is yet to be ascertained whether the theme on your site will be compatible with the new version. Moreover, it is always advisable to let someone else discover the features of the new Magento version.
However, if you are still eager to buy the upgraded version of Magento before Christmas, then there are a couple of practical things to consider:
– Prepare yourself and your eCommerce store before upgrading to new Magento
– Take full backup of your Magento store. The backup is the first thing you ought to do before upgrading begins. This is an essential procedure which will not only help in saving your precious data but will also help in restoring your old data in case something goes wrong during the upgrading process on your website. In case your Magento version update goes wrong, you can easily roll everything back.
– Make sure your server is compatible to the minimum system requirements of the Magento version you are upgrading to.
– Since your store’s upgrade will take several hours, it is not feasible to shut your eCommerce store down for the entire time. Therefore, construct a sandbox to test the update. Testing the updated version on a sandbox will save your time and also help you to know if the website is going to work after the update or not.
Remember, do not update your current Magento website unless you are 100% sure of it. While the new Magento version is a big step in the right direction, it will be practical to hang on for some time and wait for the correct review before improving the old version.
About the Author: Piyush Mathur is working with Planet Web Solution Pvt. Ltd as Project Manager and Senior Web Developer. He is a result-driven young professional with 9 + years’ experience in Web Development, Systems Set up, Technology Administration along with PHP, MySQL, XML, and HTML implementation knowledge. He is also a technocrat with expertise in Magento, WordPress, Joomla, Oscommerce and Zencart open source platforms.
