After a long wait, Magento 2.0 has been finally released and the platform has come up with a lot of improved features that promises to speed up the website performance and offer an enhanced checkout process.
When Magento CMS was first launched in the year 2008, it acted like a game changer for ecommerce and from that time onwards the ecommerce landscape significantly changed and this popular platform has evolved to adapt to the current trends.
It is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms that are written in PHP and the first release was when the PHP version was 5.2.
Now that the PHP community has finally seen the release of PHP 7, we can focus on its usage with Magento 2.0.1. The latest edition of Magento is now available with high security features and functional updates and also includes the official support for PHP 7.0.2.
It is said that the latest version of PHP will improve the performance that will include even the worst case scenarios, while other technologies like Varnish etc. improves the performance only in the best case scenarios. It works on a completely different level and so developers can combine to get a really fast Magento store. Online merchants can now enjoy the benefits of dramatic performance improvements, reduced memory consumption and various new language features.
If you have a Magento 1.x store and want to upgrade it to the latest version, then unfortunately there is no upgrade path and so you will need to recreate your store and it is highly recommended to fully test the Magento 2 store in a development environment before shutting down the older version.
However GitHub has come up with a Code Migration Toolkit, which provides scripts that make it easy for the Magento developers to process the migrating custom Magento 1.x code, configurations and layouts to the latest version. It automates some time consuming conversions tasks and helps the developers to focus on refactoring processes. The toolkit can also be customized to meet specific project needs and produce codes that follow Magento 2.0 best practices.
Having analyzed various test results, it is suggested to shift to PHP 7 because of its higher speed. It is significantly faster than its previous versions. Though Magento 1.x is not compatible with PHP 7, but it is simple to patch. There are also new tools for refactoring and optimizing the existing code to work with new engine and the technology preview of Zend server adds support for PHP 7 making it easy to migrate various applications for improved performance.
Magento 2 will also work with the latest version of PHP and will certainly accelerate the site’s performance. But it is suggested that you test PHP 7 on a development site and check the extension’s compatibility before deploying it to the live store.
