Today Magento gave a technical discussion on their new Magento 2 Platforms and some of the goals they were trying to achieve with this new version. You can watch the entire webinar on YouTube:
There are a bunch of improvements in Magento 2 but the development team identified the following overarching goals with this new release:
- Update Technology Stack
- Streamline Customization Process
- Reduce Upgrade Efforts
- Improve Performance
- Improve Quality
- Improve Engagement with Community
Some of the things Modern Retail is excited about with this Magento 2.0 release include:
- PHP 5.5 and MySQL 5.6 will standard engines in Magento 2.0.
- Magento's standardization on jQuery, HTML 5 and CSS 3 for the website front-end!
- Less dependency on Mage_Core and reduction of code coupling and complexity.
- Skins and Packages are gone! Magento 2.0 only uses Themes!
- Magento code quality has improved and they are adhering to coding principles and coding standards outlined by the PHP Framework Interop Group: http://www.php-fig.org/
- Extension dependencies are reduced.
- Easier upgrades.
- Improved Performance. The latest versions of Magento Enterprise and Community Edition have made some nice strides around performance so we're excited to see what Magento 2.0 brings.
- Introduction of a new Service Layer.
- Given all our POS and ERP integrations, we're excited about the improvements they've made to their API.
If you haven't downloaded Magento 2.0 yet you can do so from GitHub:
You can also follow along by visiting Magento's Wiki and clicking on the Magento 2 Product Documentation:
Finally, Magento has not yet finalized a release date for Magento 2.0! Sorry!!!