Magento 1.4 is out
Saturday, 13 February 2010Magento 1.4.0.0 Stable has been released. The new e-commerce version brings a lot of enhancements of the current Magento functionality, but also some cool new features. Let's take a look.
Performance improvements
Apart from the hundreds of bugfixes which were fixed in 1.4, there seems to be a major improvement regarding performance. In the backend of Magento 1.3, saving a product sometimes took upto 10 minutes because of some internal indexing of all products. These indexing tasks have now been improved, which makes the backend faster and more responsive.
In the backend, the cache management and index management have split up into two separate pages, making it easier to perform daily tasks.
WYSIWYG editor
One of the main features of Magento 1.4.0.0 is the new WYSIWYG-editor, which allows for easy editing of CMS-blocks and CMS Pages. The editor is actually a TinyMCE 3 editor extended with two Magento-specific plugins. These plugins allow you to insert so-called widgets into your content. And a widget provides some kind of information specific for Magento: A store URL, a product image, a complete theming block.
The WYSIWYG editor improves the managability of CMS Pages a lot. But it still has shortcomings regarding CMS-functionality which are all solved with our Magento to Joomla! bridge: Adding social tools, having a structure for all your content, blogging utilities, they are all reasons to choose for MageBridge instead of just a plain Magento instance. Even better: With Joomla! it's much easier to include other components as well: Helpdesk, forum, FAQ, screenshots, etcetera. With the coming of Magento 1.4, it's surely not the end of MageBridge - it's the beginning of a whole new era for MageBridge with exiting new features.
For our MageBridge customers
Now that MageBridge becomes increasingly popular, the most important question regarding MageBridge in combination with Magento 1.4 is: Does it work? The answer is: Yes. We have done already thorough testing with Magento 1.4 Alpha, Beta and RC together with MageBridge, and an upgrade should go with much problems.
Even better: MageBridge already supports Magento 1.4 Widgets, even before the official release of Magento 1.4 has hit the market. We are still working on migrating the TinyMCE-plugins to become JCE-plugins in Joomla! but this work will be finished somewhere in March.