Software update: Magento 2.1

Magento is an open source content management platform that focuses on e-commerce. It was owned by eBay since 2012, but since late 2015 it’s been up and running again own legs, thanks to investor Permira. Magento runs on an environment with Apache 2.2 or 2.4, PHP 5.6.x or 5.5.x, and MySQL 5.6.x. The package is available in two flavors, namely the Community Edition and the Enterprise Edition. For more information about this platform, please refer to this page, where architecture is discussed. Version 2.1 has been available for several days now and includes the following highlights:

Highlights

Magento 2.1.0 includes several new and exciting features:

• (Enterprise) Content Staging and Preview improves sales and productivity by enabling merchants to bring fresh and exciting shopping experiences to market faster than ever before. Marketers and merchandisers can easily create, preview, and schedule a wide range of content updates without involving IT. They can make updates to products, categories, CMS content, promotions, and pricing, and can preview these changes by date or store view to ensure a flawless shopper experience. User-friendly dashboards provide visibility into all scheduled site changes so merchants can easily coordinate campaigns to maximize their sales impact. Updates are automatically published and removed at scheduled times for greater efficiency.
• (Enterprise) Elasticsearch is cutting edge search technology that is replacing Solr in Magento Enterprise Edition 2.1. It is simpler to set up, able to handle large catalogs, and can easily scale as search volume grows. It supports 33 languages ​​out-of-the-box and merchants can set ‘stop words’, search synonyms, and attribute weighting to deliver highly relevant search results..
• (Enterprise & Community) PayPal enhancements include PayPal in-context checkout and saved credit cards. In-context checkout helps to increase conversion rates 69 bps by allowing shoppers to pay with PayPal without leaving the merchant’s site. PayPal saved credit cards boost repeat purchases by allowing merchants to securely store credit card information with PayPal so customers do not need to re-enter it in checkout or when reordering items from the Admin interface.
• (Enterprise & Community) Braintree Hosted Fields securely collect all sensitive payment information in checkout so merchants can qualify for the simplest set of PCI compliance requirements. Merchants retain complete control over their checkout style and layout because Braintree gathers credit card data using small, transparent iframes that replace individual payment fields. Braintree settlement reports are now also conveniently available within the Magento Admin.
• (Enterprise & Community) Improved management interfaces make it faster and easier to search for information in the Admin, set up global search synonyms, and create new product, category, and CMS content.