New Magento Enterprise 1.14.1
Just one week ago…
Magento Released Enterprise 1.14.1
This is a much more comprehensive upgrade than many that have passed, with many new functionality additions. Combining over 70 updates relating to products, payments, security and new features, this release demonstrates Magento’s commitment to continuously improve quality.
The Visual Merchandiser headlines this new upgrade; the key feature of this being the drag and drop functionality. This will allow the merchandiser to easily position products in the same order that they wish them to appear on the frontend of the site with ease. We are pleased that this has been noticed. We had developed a custom module to deliver this ourselves but having this as part of the core functionality is a real improvement, giving the merchandiser the ability to dictate which products are their hero products thus appearing at the top of the page. The new swatch functionality will also, no doubt, aid conversion through enabling merchants to showcase a broader range of product attributes.
Merchandisers can now mass assign and remove products to categories by SKU and very cleverly assign products to a category based on their attribute and value. For example, if you wanted a category to only show products that were ‚Äòblack’ in colour or under ¬£100 (or even both at the same time) it will assign them to the category. It will also do this automatically so that any future additions to the product catalogue will also be added to the appropriate category, meaning that the merchandiser doesn’t need to worry about creating a product and then also updating the category, saving them time. You can also now duplicate a category easily.
In addition to the above, the new release has improved on the in-built responsive functionality allowing gift registries, downloadable products, multiple wish lists, add to cart by SKU and private sales. They have added a new reporting feature that allows the user/merchandiser to generate a report on any problems, which then helps the support team (us) to resolve them quickly. For those employing Google’s new Universal Analytics, this is now also supported, looking ahead to the additional insight that this will provide in the future.
1.14.1 will see improved support and security updates and, all in all, looks to be the most significant upgrade that Magento have released in recent history. We could get carried away talking about their upgrade to MySQL 5.6 and PHP 5.5 but we will leave it there for now. Should you wish to know more about this, please do not hesitate to get in touch with either your account manager or Alex in the new business team.
