With a timeline recently announced for the release of Magento 2 (culminating in an expected release in Q4 of 2015), what do you need to start thinking about as a Magento developer? There is uncertainty about the impact of Magento 2, but Soap Media can at least dispel some of the concerns surrounding the shift. Read on to uncover the latest details.
Magento 2 2015 Release Schedule
1. Has Magento Changed the Templating Engine in Magento 2?
There was a lot of speculation (which could be considered, rather, as outright demand) Magento 2 would use Twig as its templating engine. The decision, however, has been made to stick with phtml.
2. Will Magento 2 Be Built on Zend 2 or Zend 3?
As with the templating decision, the Mage core will still use a heavily modified version of Zend 1 – not Zend 2/3 as speculated by the community. The decision was based on the effort required to replace all Zend 1 usage.
3. Will There By a Way to Upgrade from Magento 1.x to Magento 2?
Migration tools will be offered for data and media only (as the database structure is very similar) prior to launch.
4. What About Upgrading Themes and Extensions? Will Those Need To Be Re-Done?
In short, there is no quick fix upgrade for them. Themes and extensions will need to be entirely replatformed/ported due to the different pre-processor and deprecated methods in blocks support.
5. Has the Database Structure Changed?
The database structure is similar to Magento 1 (some MySQL indexes were removed and added, some fields and tables are renamed). Whilst some refactoring of extensions will be required, the consistency of the database should make for a less painful process in comparison to a complete rewrite.
6. When Should I Start to Look at Upgrading My Website/Extension?
The advice from the Magento team is for extensions developers to start looking at revising Developer Beta Release Candidate.
7. Anything Else I Should Know?
- Varnish (VCL generation alone) and Nginx are supported out of the box.
- Supposedly improved performance and scalability benefits (20% has been suggested).
- Magento 2 will not ship with No SQL integration.
- Code examples coming end of March demonstrating features and how to apply them (like how to add a custom payment module).
