Magento 2.2.6 – Release, Enhancements, Fixes & Everything

Ever since its evolution, Magento has been constantly improving and innovating to offer its users one of the sturdiest and safest platform to build your virtual properties over. Magento has given enormous significance to the security of its users with the release of Magento Commerce 2.2.6 as well as Magento Open Source 2.2.6. This version comes with 25+ core security fixes which is going to focus on the safety vulnerabilities and improve your site speed at the same time. Shutting down on cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery and enhancing the performance of catalog indexing, this version of Magento is all set to give a very tough time to the hackers.

Major Code Fixes are:

Performance Appraisals.
Multithreading, a relatively newer concept has played a vital role in the substantial improvement of stores on Magento. Cutting down the execution time by 90% and 80% of the re-indexing time, a certain CLI command bags the credit.

Improved Checkout Process.
Now checkout has been given a cool refresh. Your shopping cart will not get emptied or your shipping address will not get deleted on a guest checkout page with repeated refreshes.The speed of placing an order will not at all be affected by the number of shipping or payment methods chosen like before. Learn how to improve checkout process.

No Downtime.
For online store owners who have a large number of products, customers or orders, find it really hard to update their catalog as it usually make their website non-operational or ‘down” during that time. Creating a capability, Magneto now ensures that the site unavailability will not happen even while doing the schema changes.

Major Enhancements:

Magento 2.2.6 witnesses improved handling of virtual products. It appears as a new entry in the Admin panel that will display Amazon Pay in the list for the payment options on your store.

It also has the new Consent Insight for dotmailer which allows you to request and capture the consent of customers and guests using it.

An automated onboarding and account sign in is included in Klarna Payments section. Adding the shipping and discount order lines to the order management calls has made your store more organised. Klarna will be passing the shipping details in capture requests and its API returns with the name and logo URL for each payment method.

More Sensible Catalog Sorting.
Configurable products in your store will be more sensibly sorted with this new version of Magento. It allows the products to be sorted on the basis of visible prices. This is being called “more sensible” by us as earlier, catalog sorting would fetch the results of products which are even out-of-stock or disabled child products.

Sales and Payment Methods Enhancements.
Magento 2.2.6 has been inculcated with a lot of improvement seven on the payment methods like Braintree and Paypal. The order status and ability to create multiple credit memos even in a single session are some of the major improvements that Magento has executed in its new version. Resolving the issue of disabled invoice emails is a major enhancement on the sales front.

Magento Shipping.
Magento has introduced a concept of Click & collect in its new version. This feature introduced in the Shipping module allows you to configure certain source/locations/stores and enable your customers to collect their shipment directly from the assigned locations

Batch Processing.
Another important feature introduced to aid you to book shipments for a batch of orders. In other words you may now book/modify/specify experiences for the orders assigned to a batch. This is highly useful feature for you, if you are getting a large number of orders.

Gift Cards.
With the festive season on the verge, Magento has been really thoughtful of its merchants. Magento 2.2.6 now allows you to save the gift cards without changing the price on the Admin to an unacceptable format. As earlier, while trying to save amounts, it would end up giving an error due to an unacceptable format (like a comma in a four digit price).

Magento Commerce Cloud.
Magento Cloud Tools package too has been upgraded with multiple updates which are being called as ece-tools. The major and revolutionary enhancements in this include enabling zero-downtime deployments, improved Docker setup, configuration process and an improved environment configuration validation.

Conclusion
Magento has officially announced that Magento 1.x version will get the support till the end of June 2020. This means that if you continue to run your store on 1.x version even after June 2020 then you are exposed to the security vulnerabilities and might be the soft target of the hackers. Hence migrating to Magento 2.x will the wisest decision of the time.

With the release of new versions and security patches, hackers get to know the loopholes in the earlier versions which again might put your store on risk. Magento 2.2.6 has been claimed to have been equipped with the biggest updates ever. With 25+ security fixes, 10 significant performance improvements and over 150 product quality enhancements 2.2.6 is here to stay for long offering you the best, fastest and more reliable platform.
If you are looking more details and complete updates on the Magento 2.2.6 please visit Release Notes.
For any queries or help on Magneto 2 Development please feel free to contact us.
Till then stay Updated and Stay optimized!