Developers and Designers are about to give a big welcome to Magento Community 1.8! It has taken a steady leap from Alpha to Magento Community Edition 1.8.0.0 in General Availability on 25th September 2013. This new edition improves tax calculations, boosts product quality and stability, enhances performance, and advances security for the rapidly growing Magento community. Let’s have a detailed sneak peak:
Accurate Tax Calculations
Magento Community Edition 1.8 improves the accuracy of tax calculation by eliminating minute rounding errors that can be confusing to buyers.
- Tax Configuration settings which normally generate Rounding Problems will show warning messages to Magento Admin before saving the Tax Rule
- Magento 1.8 also provides a guide which describes the best practices to configure the Tax Rules Magento CE 1.8 and EE 1.13: Recommended Tax Configurations and Best Practices
- Rounding Functions are added to avoid the problems associated with checkout calculations of Bundled Type of Products
- All product price information on which taxation is based are rounded to two digits of precision
- Several Rounding errors are also got fixed in Magento Community 1.8
Features Improved
Almost 350 Functional Improvements are introduced with Magento Community Edition 1.8.0.0, below are some areas of improvement:
Web Store and Shopping Cart
- Customer Account Creation Date is added
- Relationship between Product Price and Website Scope has been improved
- Elimination of Post Checkout Error “There has been an error processing your request. Please contact us or try again later”
- Shipping Table Rates for all shipping methods, issues associated with table rates resolved
- Improvements in Live Shipping rate calculations for FexEx, DHL, etc.
- And many more
Promotional Price Rule
- Shopping Cart and Catalog Price Rules are now working properly with Customer Groups
- Product Attributes can now be used in Catalog Price Rules
- Discount Generated through Price Rules will work even in case of Checkout at Multiple Addresses
- And Many More
Payment Method
- Security associated with Google Checkout and Authorize will now be applied more strictly
- Cancelling the PayPal Payment during checkout will not affect Shopping Cart anymore
- Partial Refunds and Invoices are now supported under Payflow Pro
- PayPal Express and PayPal Pro now handles Partial Refunds
- No rounding errors will occur during PayPal Express checkout transactions from now on
- And Many More
Performance Boost
Magento Community Edition 1.8 enables a better shopping experience through faster page-loading in the checkout process and the performance of the 1.8 administrator panel is also improved for those of you with large product or order databases.
- Eliminates unnecessary Cache Cleanups
- Localization of Email settings will be configured dynamically by checking the Customer Locale
- Improving the overall checkout process performance by loading the progress information for the current checkout step only
- Support for more than 30,000 Tax Codes without any impact on performance
Security Enhancements
- Errors are not displayed in a new Magento installation.
- Fixed session fixation vulnerability in the new user registration process. Attackers can no longer abuse this flaw to take over new user accounts during registration.
- Prevent an user with limited privileges to delete the Magento installation.
- Prevent attacks that use OAuth to leak sensitive information to an attacker that knows the consumer key and user token.
- And Many More
Connect it more easily
Below are the list of Magento Webservices SOAP v2.0 APIs which are modified or improved in new Magento Community Edition 1.8.0.0, and using this modified package, connecting Magento with third party systems becomes more secure, faster and accurate. Following APIs are improved/modified:
- salesOrderAddComment
- shoppingCartProductMoveToCustomerQuote
- salesOrderList
- shoppingCartPaymentList
- productAttributeAddOption and catalogProductAttributeUpdate
- salesOrderCreditmemoCreate
- catalogProductAttributeInfo
- XML-RPC API: Using the product_custom_option.add operation with multicall no longer results in redundant options
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