Magento 2.0 Released - Should I Upgrade Before Christmas?

Howdy,

Magento 2.0 was officially released yesterday, however…

Before you run away and think “ooooo shiny new toy” with Magento 2.0 there are a couple of practical things to consider.

Before we start, basically Magento 2.0 is the following:

The user interface in the admin area has changed a bit
A rewrite of the same features as Magento 1.X but using jQuery
It now uses Composer for managing packages/updates

Note:

If you’re wondering what jQuery & Composer are: jQuery is the defacto standard for making Javascript work across all the different browsers types. eBay, Amazon & LinkedIn use jQuery. And composer, that is a tool for dependency management in PHP (what Magento uses) and makes updates easier to manage.

It’s really important to note, we knew a long time ago that they would be releasing Magento 2.0 at this time of the year and our advice has been explicitly:

“Don’t consider upgrading at least the middle of 2016.”

The reason for this is that there isn’t a clear upgrade path from 1.9.X to the new 2.0 version. Extensions will need to be migrated and also it’s unlikely your theme will be completely compatible with the new version.

And then if we take into consideration the time of the year, November, changing anything at this time of the year is never suggested.

Also as you’ve learned from myself & Dave over at UnderstandingE during the past 2-3 years, with Magento updates, always let someone else find the hidden features and wait for the minor updates to come out before upgrading.

With that said, I’m personally excited about the release.

The admin area is a lot, lot easier to use and yes things have moved around quite a bit, once you get over the hurdle of working out where setting x or y or z has been moved too, it’s actually a lot faster to make changes, update products and so on… I like it, you’ll like it.

But keeping one foot on the ground, it’s completely the wrong time of the year to even think about using Magento 2.0, theme and extension developers won’t have caught up yet. While Magento 2.0 is a huge step in the right direction, but just hang back a while and let the dust settle.

As always, to your continued success,

Matt Ogborne
Co-Founder of UnderstandingE