Magento has recently updated its Community Edition. Magento Community 1.8 boasts major enhancements and updates to functions including tax calculations, security, functional and performance improvements, and a patch for the United States Postal Service (USPS). These updates allow Magento to continue to deliver an exceptional product to their growing customer base. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key highlights of Magento Community 1.8.
Version 1.8 includes improvements to tax calculation accuracy and formulas and eliminates potential rounding errors. The update also offers additional assistance with configuration. Magento made roughly 350 functional improvements in order to enhance the product quality in significant areas, specifically to the web store, shopping cart, admin order creation, import and export functionality, web API components, and payment methods.
In terms of performance improvements, users will enjoy an enhanced shopping experience, as pages will load faster in the checkout process. Cache adapters for single server systems have been optimized which will minimize the number of cached pages that must be refreshed when product updates are made. In addition, the administrative panel was also improved and will be of use to users with large products/orders. The USPS patch enables users to continue using USPS and addresses the name changes the Priority and Express shipping options in API underwent in July. Magento Community users will also enjoy enhanced security in 1.8 that arouse out of a number of enhancements.
The released version of 1.8 contains updates that were made to the alpha version. The requirement to have globally unique category and product URL keys, which allows users greater flexibility in URL structures. Magento Community 1.8 delivers a wonderful product that is certainly worth the upgrade.
