Magento, now a part of Adobe Commerce, has several changes with its 2.4.6 update. In addition to over 300 quality fixes and improvements, the update introduces new features to impress shop owners and developers alike.
Magento is an open-source ecommerce platform. This allows businesses to customize the content, functionality, and look of their online store, all while ensuring a pleasant shopping experience. For those who enjoy being able to fully customize their site, Magento provides a better option than its primary competitor, Shopify.
Magento 2.4.6 introduces security enhancements that aim to prevent cyber attacks. Additionally, support for PHP 8.4 is established. PHP 8.1 is still supported, but PHP 7.4 has now been removed. There are also several performance and scalability enhancements introduced. Optimization to GraphQL has been implemented for bulk cart operations and category tree rendering response.
Table of Contents
Highlights
There are several key areas of change with the Magento update, including security, platform, performance and scalability, accessibility, GraphQL, Braintree, PWA studio, and Page Builder.
Security Improvements
Adobe has shown a clear dedication to improving security with each Magento update. Though there have not been any confirmed attacks, these updates are designed to strengthen any potential weaknesses. It is estimated that 47% of Americans have had their personal information exposed to cyber criminals, so these precautions are very important. This prevents attackers from accessing customer information or taking over administrative sessions. The most notable security enhancements within Magento 2.4.6 are:
- Eight security fixes and platform security improvements
- Fixed reCAPTCHA so that it no longer crashes during checkout as abrupt errors occur during payment processing
- Addressed gaps in Admin action logs with more specific auditing of actions
- New system configuration for when a user changes their email (will now require email confirmation to do so) to reduce site vulnerability
Platform Improvements
There are several platform enhancements within the Magento update to improve user experience. Some of Magento 2.4.6’s performance improvements include:
- Supports PHP 8.2, and continues to support PHP 8.1, but PHP 7.4 has been removed
- This means you cannot run Magento 2.4.6 on PHP 7.4
- Supports Composer 2.2x, and Composer 1.x has been removed
- Supports Redis 7.0x, and Redis 6.2x will remain until 2024
- OpenSearch is the default search engine for Adobe Commerce, and an independent search engine on Magento Open Source
- OpenSearch v2.x is supported, OpenSearch 2.5 has been tested, and OpenSearch 1.x remains compatible but is not recommended
- Supports Elasticsearch 8.x
- Supports MariaDB 10.6 (LTS version), and MariaDB 10.4 remains compatible but is not recommended
- DHL schema has been migrated from v.6.2 to v.10.0
- Older JavaScript libraries have been updated, and outdated dependencies have been eliminated
- Zend framework (ZF1) components have been removed from the codebase
- Laminas dependencies have been updated to support PHP 8.2
Performance and Scalability Improvements
This version of Magento focuses on improving speed and performance. Many of the new features improve usability, particularly for merchants. Performance and scalability enhancements within this Magento update include:
- Improved performance for operations
- Merchants can improve performance for operations affecting more than 100 customer segments
- “Real-Time Check is Customer is Matched by Segment” setting can be disabled to reduce processing time
- New “Limit Number of Products in Grid” setting to restrict the number of products displayed in the product grid
- The limit starts at 20,000 by default, affecting only collections used by UI components
- Enhanced import performance (up to 100,000 records per minute)
- REST API endpoint can be used to import data to Adobe Commerce
- Same effectiveness as Admin import feature
- Can use CSV file to create, update, and remove products, product pricing, and customer entities
- Better high-throughput order processing performance
- Through load balancing, customers who have a high volume of simultaneous orders (1000 orders per minute) can balance load across different nodes to improve performance
- To balance the load once again, merchants can enable secondary connections for MySQL and Redis
Accessibility Updates
The Magento update aims to enhance the retail experience on Venia (PWA) to make it more perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. The improvements to Magento 2.4.6 include:
- Visual label for “Sign In” matches its accessible name
- Descriptive names added to buttons throughout the storefront
- Verbal descriptive labels added to “Has Video” checkboxes in search filters
- Keyboard-only users can access all page functionality
GraphQL Improvements
GraphQL performance enhancements within Magento 2.4.6 include:
- Decreased response time when querying categories that have category permissions enabled
- Resolver operation optimized
- Data provider does not reset runtime-cached data for every new product
- Product permission processing optimized in GraphQL resolver, product permissions now assigned to product collections
- Optimized permissions are in the shared catalog in the “addProductsToCart” mutation
- Product permissions optimized with product inline fragments
- Category tree rendering performance is optimized
- Improved custom attributed metadata fetching for category models
- Improved Category ID fetching
- Improved category children loading
- Bulk cart operations query response times are reduced
- Customer query supports order sorting
Braintree Improvements
Within the Magento update, the following improvements to Braintree have been made:
- PayLater messaging with PayPal Vault
- Additional Fraud Protection and ACH webhooks
- Fraud Protection webhook is enabled when a risk decision has been made within Braintree
- ACH webhook is enabled when the status of the ACH payment is changed to “settled” or “settlement declined”
- Local Payment Methods (LPM) webhook
PWA Studio and Page Builder Improvements
- PWA Studio v.13.0.x is compatible with Magento 2.4.6
- Includes improvements to accessibility
- Page Builder v.17.3 is compatible with Magento 2.4.6
Fixed Issues
With over 300 quality fixes and enhancements, there are several issues that are resolved with the Magento update. From improving performance to increasing accessibility to refining payment methods, there are many concerns that have been resolved with Magento 2.4.6. Some of the most notable fixes are:
- Issues related to Magento installation, upgrade, and launching have been resolved
- Bulk products now upgraded through API and filtered without errors
- Button workflow in Checkout and Review Order process made more accessible
- Full-page cache is not displayed unless the product is out of stock
- Data is cached when L2 cache is configured
- “Display Out of Stock Products” functionality is improved
- Customers will no longer receive duplicate emails after an Admin creates an order
- Merchants can establish a custom external SMTP provider
- Customers who exceed the maximum number of failed logins can log in after resetting their password
- Even when the Free Shopping Cart rule applies to only a subset of items in the cart, shipping rates for FedEx, UPS, and USPS will be calculated correctly
- Since 22% of shoppers abandon their online shopping because of slow shipping times, presenting accurate information is very important
System Requirements
System requirements have changed significantly since the last Magento update. The specifications for Magento 2.4.6 are:
- PHP 8.2 is recommended, but 8.1 is also supported
- OpenSearch tested on 2.5, but 2.x is recommended
- Composer 2.2
- Elasticsearch 8.x
- Redis 7.0
- MariaDB 10.6
- MySQL 8.0
- RabbitMQ 3.9
- Varnish 7.1
- Apache 2.4
- Nginx 1.18
- AWS Aurora (MySQL) 8.0
- AWS MQ 3.9.13
- AWS OpenSearch 1.2
How to Update
Accurately updating the Magento platform is key to improved functionality. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to install the Magento update:
- Enable Maintenance Mode
- Run the following command php bin/magento maintenance:enable
- Create a backup of the composer.json file
- Set up a backup for Magento application and database
- Set up a staging environment for the update
- Deploy in the production environment
- Run the following command cp composer.json composer.json.bak
- Set up the package prerequisites
- Updating with Composer
- If you are currently using Magento 2.4.5, you can use Composer
- If you are using a version older than 2.4.1, you will first need to update to a version that is compatible with Composer 2 using Composer 1
- Before upgrading, run the following commands
- composer require magento/composer-root-update-plugin ~2.0 –no-update
- composer update
- Then check the Composer version
- composer -v
- Then enter the command for Magento 2.4.6
- composer require-commerce magento/product-community-edition 2.4.6 –no-update
- Update the Database Schema and Data
- Run the following commands
- php bin/magento setup:upgrade
- php bin/magento setup:di:compile
- php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy -f
- php bin/magento cache:clean
- Run the following commands
- Disable Maintenance Mode
- Run the following command
- php bin/magento maintenance:disable
- Run the following command
Conclusion
The Magento update shows considerable improvements to the security, performance, and accessibility of the platform. As store owners improve the shopping experience for customers by tapping into the power of Magento, it will continue to grow as an ecommerce platform. In fact, the industry is expected to be valued at over $7.4 trillion by 2025.
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