Magento 2 – The Future Commerce (Part 1)
Magento, one of the world’s leading open-source ecommerce platform, has finally released the beta version of Magento 2 on December, 2014. Magento 2 was actually announced back in 2010 by the former CTO Yoav Kutner, during the keynote session of Developers Paradise, 2010. It took around 4 years for the Magento team to release the beta-testing version and the code-base is now available on Github. Installation of M2 (Magento 2) is bit tricky for a Magento Developer, but it’s really easy for the one who got involved with any of the latest PHP framework installations. Magento 2 has documented the installation procedure and is descriptive enough to download and install new Magento without any hassle.
In this section we are going to look on the the Demo theme(Luma) and finding out the features.
On completing the code installation, we will get redirected to a wizard-like window on calling the URL. Once you agree the terms & agreements, you will be lead to a simplified setup wizard and when this configuration process is over, there will be a screen similar to this with the details and credentials for your site.
Frontend
With new enhancement features like, HTML5, CSS3 (with LESS preprocessor), jQuery and its libraries, RequireJs, we can expect a much more simplified, but a feature rich front end. If you have installed the demo content, you will be welcomed with a calmed yoga face.
Listing Page and View Page
M2 Product Listing Page(PLP) is filled with surprises, like 3D selection borders, add to cart, wishlists are now powered with Ajax, and the accordion like filters are the remarkable visual changes that I found in the PLPs.
In M2 Product View Page (PVP), I cannot see much visual changes, apart from product image changes on changing the size/color of the product and the Ajax Cart function. These functions are already available for Magento 1.x, but in the form of add-on extensions, in M2 these are part of the core.
Cart & Checkout
As M2 is packed with Ajax Cart, the role for Cart is very less. But we can access the Cart page from Ajax Cart. Like we have in our Magento 1.x versions we also have facility to disable this and set redirect to cart page on adding product.
Checkout page is completely different from the 1.x one-page checkout (Yes, they haven’t changed the name). In M2, one page checkout has only 2 steps (Shipping & Payment) and completely rebuilded with Ajax.
Conclusion
Last, but not the least one of the main feature we found is the Full-Page caching mechanism, which is an enterprise feature for Magento 1.x. We still have no word on whether the full page caching will be available on the stable versions of Magento 2.x (Community).If you got any doubts on installing Magento 2, please check our related post How to Install Magento 2.
Cubet e-commerce team is seriously following the progress and learning the new features and developing concepts of Magento 2. In the next part we would like to introduce you the main features of Magento 2 Admin section. Please keep checking our Magento 2 Development page for updates.
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