Magento launched Community Edition 1.7 near the end of first quarter of 2012. This year with the launch of Enterprise Edition 1.13 and with Magento 2 on the road map, Magento has yet again provided its Community Edition followers something to be happy about. Magento has launched Magento Community Edition 1.8.0.0 Alpha for preview with some long-awaited and quite desperately-needed enhancements. Most of the changes that we will see in CE 1.8 are in common with the enhancements made in EE 1.13. This Magento Community Edition release focuses majorly on quality and stability improvements, performance enhancements and security. However some enhancements like newly Optimized Indexing system introduced in Enterprise Edition 1.13 has been left out in this Community Edition. Still it has got enough potential to surprise the existing Community Edition users.
Key improvements we will experience with Magento Community Edition 1.8.0.0:
Performance Improvements
The checkout process performance has been hugely enhanced. Loading of the progress information for the current checkout step only will lead to a better checkout performance. Large database lookups will be speedier than before in this Magento Community Edition. Most importantly now Magento can load a huge number of tax codes (35,000 approx.) without impacting performance.
Improved Tax Calculation
Enhanced Tax calculation algorithms have been implemented in this Edition. Several issues confronted in the previous editions like Tax calculation on orders with discounted products, rounding errors, fixed Product tax, etc. have been resolved. Tax Calculation methods have been updated to support the changing tax regulations of Canada.
Functional Enhancements
More than 350 functional improvements have made in this release. Fixes have been done on the key areas like web store, shopping cart, admin order creation, credit memo, import and export functionality, promotional price rule, web API components and payment methods. Community Edition 1.8 is now World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) compliant.
Security Enhancements
Security features of Community Edition have been enhanced too. Web browsers will no longer be able to save Magento Admin panel or web store account credentials. The cryptographic methods used to store passwords have also been improved. Some key measures have been taken to prevent session fixation attacks. For a detailed list of enhancements kindly refer to the Official Release Note for Magento Community Edition 1.8
