Exploring New Features in Magento 2.3.4

Magento has released some major enhancements packaged as version 2.3.4. The Pre-release date was set as Jan 14, 2020, and the General Availability (GA) date was set as Jan 28, 2020. Turns out Magento Commerce customers can get the access two weeks before the announced GA date for 2.3.x patch. In this article, learn what new features and improvements have been included with the latest upgrade for both Magento Open source (formerly Community Edition) and Magento Commerce (formerly Enterprise Edition)

Per Magento Open Source & Commerce release notes,

This release includes over 220 functional fixes to the core product and over 30 security enhancements. It includes resolution of over 275 contributions by our community members. These community contributions range from minor clean-up of core code to significant enhancements to Inventory Management and GraphQL.

Following are some highlights of this release

Substantial security enhancements

Over 30 security enhancements have been deployed

• To close cross-site scripting (XSS) and remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities
• Removal of custom layout updates and the deprecation of layout updates to eliminate the opportunity for Remote Code Execution (RCE)
• Introduces redesigned content template features so that only whitelisted variables can be added to templates

Magento recommends taking all necessary steps to protect your Admin, including but not limited to- IP whitelisting, two-factor authentication, use of a VPN, the use of a unique location rather than /admin, and good password hygiene

Major platform Upgrades

The following platform upgrades help enhance website security and PCI compliance.

• Enhancements to the message queue framework via the latest release of RabbitMQ v3.8
• Improved page caching and session storage tested on the latest stable release of Redis v5.0.6
• Enhanced support for MariaDB 10.2. by which we now have normalized values returned by MariaDB
• The core integration of the Authorize.net payment method has been deprecated. Magento recommends using the official payment integration that is available on Marketplace.

Performance Boosts

Merchants and customers will see performance improvements as a result of the below enhancements:

• Customer section invalidation mechanism has been refactored and banner cache logic improved in order to eliminate the redundant non-cached requests to the server on catalog pages
• PHTML files have been refactored to better support parsing by the bundling mechanism
• A new configuration setting (System Configuration > General > Reports > General Options) allows merchants to completely or partially disable Magento Reports

1. Statistics collection for the Reports module is disabled by default
2. Magento recommends disabling Reports functionality for performance reasons when this capability is not required

Infrastructure improvements

The 2.3.4 release contains 250 enhancements to core quality, which improve the quality of the Framework and select modules (catalog, sales, PayPal, Elasticsearch, import, and CMS)

Merchant tool enhancements

Integration with Adobe Stock image galleries that enables merchants to add high quality media assets to their website content without leaving the Magento Admin.

Dotdigital

Live Chat powered by dotdigital enables merchants to increase conversion rates, and keep customers coming back with real-time engagement.

• All Magento 2.3.x merchants (both Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce) can receive a free live chat agent

Inventory management

Inventory Management enhancements for this release include:

• Addressed a known issue causing higher than expected loads on the database server.
• Updated the Inventory Reservations CLI command to reduce memory usage.
• Resolved quality issues related to credit memos, grouped products, source and stock mass actions.

Read this for more information.

GraphQL

This release includes improved GraphQL coverage for search, layered navigation, cart functionality. The following mutations/queries are available:

• Guest carts can now be merged with customer carts
• A customer can start an order on one device and complete it on another
• Layered navigation can use custom filters
• Search categories by ID, name, and/or URL key

To get a detailed understanding of the enhancements and security principles implemented, we encourage you to read the Magento release notes for Open Source & Commerce.

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