What’s new from Adobe’s stable for the year 2022? Adobe has lined up pretty exciting updates for the year 2022. Apart from Adobe Summit 2022, there’s one significant announcement that the folks at Adobe have scheduled. It’s the release of the latest version of Adobe Commerce, 2.4.4.
Adobe Commerce, 2.4.4 pre-release is available now. The general availability would be on April 12th 2022, as per official reports from Adobe.
Adobe already released the beta version for developers and solution partners to get a better understanding of the codebase. We’d like to share a few insights based on our hands-on experience.
PHP 8.1 Support
Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 will feature significant upgrades from its predecessor, 2.4.3. The latest version from Adobe will be powered by PHP 8.1. The support for the latest PHP version is a regular practice followed by Adobe with its every new version release as the platform is based on the language.
Official sources have confirmed that the support for PHP 8.1 will come to effect only after four months of the release to provide enough time for Adobe Solution Partners to build their expertise over it. With Magento 2.4.4, Adobe will be discontinuing support for PHP version 7.1.
Dependencies
Magento depends on third-party software and external libraries like JavaScript. With each new version of Magento, the platform’s dependencies get updated to the latest version of the third-party systems in parallel. Here’s a list of system dependencies for Magento 2.4.4.
System Dependencies
- Composer 2.x
- ElasticSearch 7.16
- OpenSearch 1.2
- Maria DB 10.4
- MySQL 8.0
- PHP 8.1
- RabbitMQ 3.9
- Redis 6.2
- Varnish 7.0
- Apache 2.4
- Nginx 1.8
For more details on system dependencies, you can refer Magento devdocs.
Dependencies on external libraries
To achieve compatibility with PHP 8.x, Magento has upgraded its Core Composer dependencies and third-party libraries like Zend framework files and JavaScript libraries. Composer is used to manage dependencies over external libraries. The composer manages the installation and update process of the libraries that PhP depends on. Composer stores all the external libraries in its installation directory (vendor/).
That’s with the dependencies part you’ll need to know in Magento version 2.4.4. Now let’s look at some of the performance, platform, and customer experience enhancements that the latest version has in store.
Security enhancements in Magento 2.4.4
The latest release from Magento has three major platform security enhancements. Most of the improvements include compliance with the new security best practices including:
- For API Bearer token authentication, integration tokens cannot be used. Magento has taken this measure because of the security issues that a case of a never-expiring access token creates.
- Session IDs will not be stored in the database.
- Tokens like OAuth access tokens and password reset tokens will be encrypted while being stored in the database.
- reCAPTCHA support for coupon codes
- Swagger cannot remain enabled when Adobe Commerce is in production mode
- Validation has been fortified to eliminate the upload of non alpha-numeric file extensions
- Security fixes are backported to version Adobe Commerce 2.4.3-p2 and Adobe Commerce 2.3.7-p3
Magento 2.4.4 Performance enhancements
Magento 2.4.4 has improvements in order validation and cart operations, enabling merchants like you to process orders faster and streamline checkout and fulfillment operations. This version also supports the ElasticSearch version (7.16.1) and OpenSearch 1.1, which will fetch results faster for users.
Scalability and performance improvements in order processing
With Adobe Commerce 2.4.4, the platform has improved order processing capabilities and better throughput in message queue optimization.
Higher throughput in order processing has been achieved through the newly included ‘Asynchronous Orders’ feature. This feature facilitates the creation of 60,000 orders/hour approximately, which is 6x more than the previous versions of Adobe Commerce.
The previous versions supported 10,000 orders/hour (approximately), which was not enough for merchants to create more orders faster during scenarios like flash sales. The new ‘Multiple Consumers’ feature enables Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 to scale the number of message queue consumers on a single Cloud instance. This enhances the ability to process more orders per hour.
Cart-level performance improvements in Magento 2.4.4
AsyncOrder
The AsyncOrder feature, when enabled, helps your eCommerce store to process orders in the background while shoppers can go on with finishing other tasks in your storefront. Hence the feature achieves faster order placement than synchronous order execution.
Enable Inventory Check On Cart Load
This feature provides a switch to enable or disable the inventory check for a product when it is added to a cart. By default, this option will be enabled. When disabled, Adobe Commerce will skip the inventory check, thereby speeding up the checkout process. This feature will be a handy one for purchases that have many items.
Multiple_processes
With Adobe Commerce 2.4.4, you can enable multiple consumers to perform multiple processes in parallel. This enables the task execution speed. You can enable this feature by adding multiple_processes configuration to the app/etc/env.php file.
High volume cart operations
Cart operations for carts containing hundreds of variable products have been improved by increasing the memory limit for input variables.
Deferring total calculation
Sales rules processing gets activated when customers add products to a cart, update quantity, or place an order. Magento 2.4.4 has provided an option to defer the total calculation of sales rules during the checkout process to speed up the loading time.
Checkout improvements
Besides the performance-related improvements, Magento 2.4.4 allows you to provide checkout for guest shoppers. If you are using table rates (calculate shipping rate based on several factors), here’s some good news. Magento 2.4.4 provides an improved free shipping threshold for table rates. The MAP (minimum advertised price) configuration, which allows you to comply with the minimum price fixed for a product by a manufacturer and still offer a better price to customers, had issues in the previous versions. Magento 2.4.4 has resolved those issues.
Page Builder features in Magento 2.4.4
Magento’s Page Builder has joined the list of features continuously being enhanced with every new version. This time around, Magento has fixed the text editor issues that prevailed in editing content on banners. Also, table fonts and positioning of the pop-up windows, ‘Insert/Edit image’ and ‘Insert/Edit Link’ have been improved.
GraphQL
In version 2.4.3 Magento added GraphQL support for negotiable quotes. With the latest version, you can add a payment method of negotiable quotes. Also, the settings for storage performance configuration have been improved.
GraphQL Performance Improvements in Adobe Commerce 2.4.4
GraphQL Cache – The latest version has improved how GraphQL requests are cached. Here’s where Fastly and Varnish cache systems come into play. The caching systems will now cache GraphQL requests sent with auth tokens, which speed up the response time and provide customers with a faster storefront experience.
GraphQL Cart Operations – The performance of GraphQL based cart operations have been improved. The collectQuoteTotals() method, which was called several times during a GraphQL request, has now been reduced to just one to improve the response time.
Platform Enhancements
To achieve compatibility with PHP 8.1, Magento has upgraded composer dependencies in version 2.4.4. This applies to the JS libraries too. The RequireJS library is upgraded to the latest version. Other platform enhancements in Magento 2.4.4 include support for TinyMCE 5 and PHPUnit upgrade to 9.5.x.
Updates in Magento 2.4.4 for vendor bundled extensions
Magento has been one of the platforms that provide default support for various integrated extensions to enable merchants to offer a better experience for their customers.
Vendor Bundled Extensions (VBEs) are third-party extensions that are packed with every new version of Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce. Magento experts thoroughly test these extensions before release.
So far, Magento has been providing extensions like Amazon Pay, dotdigital, Klarna, Vertex, Yotpo, and Braintree. In Magento 2.4.4, the platform has removed all vendor bundled extensions except Braintree.
Final Words
That concludes our insights on Magento 2.4.4 new features and improvements. Keep watching the space for more updates on Magent’s latest advancements. You can also check our thought leadership contents in our ‘Resources’ section.
As owners of eCommerce stores powered by Magento, it is advisable to keep your application updated to the latest version of the platform. If you are looking for assistance to handle your Magento upgrade, our Magento team can help.
