What New Features in Magento 2.3
Explore the New Features available in Magento 2.3
Published
GraphQL language
As we stated earlier, GraphQL API language is the latest and also biggest moves in Magento 2.3. GraphQL is a data query language developed by Facebook and released in 2015. Magento 2.3 implements GraphQL as an alternative API endpoint in addition to REST and SOAP.
Progressive Web App (PWA)
First, Magento 2.3 will fully support the features of PWA (progressive web app). As you may know, PWA will be a key thing in any developers’ mindset from now on. To develop it, Magento has been going ahead beginning with the development of PWA Studio – a powerful suite of tools that allow you to develop, deploy and maintain a PWA storefront on Magento 2.
GraphQL opens up data retrieval possibilities for PWA by allowing to request exactly the data that you need and also giving the ability to join data in a single request. To put it another way, you can efficiently get smaller amounts of data and to make fewer API requests. This is an advantage over a traditional SOAP / REST request which always returns all data associated with an endpoint, and needs at least one request per resource.
Asynchronous and Bulk Web API
Asynchronous API in Magento 2.3 is an important community. It enables to process a large number of API requests asynchronously without waiting for the response from the server.
In the traditional API approach, Magento may take a while to process the response and the client will be waiting a significant amount of time for a response. And the bigger the number of changes and products are, the longer it takes.
Declarative DB Schema
Magento 2.3 introduces a new approach – declarative database schema, allowing developers to define database structures and changes in XML files, instead of defining with install scripts. Magento 2.3 will convert the XML schema files into SQL statements and perform them.
The new declarative schema provides a big advantage: rollback support. This means you can roll back database changes you implement on a module or functionality to a previous version. It also simplifies the Magento 2.3 installation and upgrades processes.
PHP 7.2
Support for PHP 7.2 will be added to Magento 2.3. This allows Magento 2.3 stores to stay on top of the latest supported technologies.
PHP 7.2 will bring new development features, enhance performance and security. Especially, since PHP 7.2 ultimately removes PHP encryption module ‘mcrypt’, Magento 2.3.x will migrate from mcrypt to libsodium for password hashing.
Elasticsearch Updates
Finally, ElasticSearch will be made available to Magento Open Source of Magento 2.3 users while previously reserved for Magento Commerce only. This gives merchants the opportunity to integrate powerful search capabilities in their shops, including faceted search – filtering by attributes.
Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Lucene library. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch is developed in Java and is released as open-source under the terms of the Apache License.
WYSIWYG Upgrade
The WYSIWYG editor (or TinyMCE) is upgraded from version 3 to version 4 in Magento 2.3. It brings new enhancements for a highly customizable WYSIWYG: Widgets, variables, and media gallery are implemented as plugins and can be defined globally or on per shop instance. Actually, it is a slow update of Magento, as TinyMCE is preparing for version 5.
TinyMCE 3 will be deprecated and planned for removal in Magento 2.4.
Multi-Source Inventory (MSI)
One vital improvement introduced in Magento 2.3 (that you must know) is the Multi-Source Inventory (MSI).
MSI allows the merchant to manage all inventory sources without any third-party extensions or platforms. This functionality enables stock management in multiple locations so that merchants can properly reflect their physical warehouses in Magento 2.3 system for fulfillment.
Cache Management ACL
Another useful improvement in Magento 2.3 is a granular cache management ACL. You can control exactly which user roles can view and delete the Magento caches.
This feature is handy when you have new team members who might need time to fully interact with the system cache. Under this circumstance, you can control what level of Cache management a given team member can perform.
Page Builder
Finally, we have CMS features on this no-user-friendly platform. In Magento 2.3, the requested Page Builder is added.
The Page Builder function enables merchants to create customized pages without having to write code. In fact, this function is the integration of the current simple drag-and-drop interface based on the revised Bluefoot CMS extension. If you haven’t known yet, Bluefoot is bought by Magento.
Google reCAPTCHA and Two Factor Authentication
Magento 2.3 incorporates reCAPTCHA, a free Google service that protects your website – log in, register, contact form pages, for example – from spam and abuse. Google reCAPTCHA doesn’t solely prompt shoppers to check a box to prove that they’re not a robot before they complete a task. Rather it uses advanced risk analysis techniques, evaluates a broad range of cues that distinguish humans from bots. Notice that this is only included in reCAPTCHA v3.