Magento 1.8 – delight or danger?

After a long period of stability it’s time to wave goodbye to our old friend Magento CE 1.7.02. This has been the mainstay of our Magento installations over the last year or so, and has performed well and been very stable (compared to some versions in the distant past!).

So much so we’ve built an optimised server offering that was founded on the needs of Magento 1.7.02, so along with the assessment of the features that 1.8 has to offer, we will also be looking at tweaking our server configuration to suit the very latest!

Feature Highlights

To save you trawling the release notes here’s what we see as the big boons of this release:

  • Penny Rounding issues (could be a great bonus for Brightpearl customers)
  • Security Enhancements (fixing a few obscure exploits)
  • Performance Updates (more optimised database calls)
  • Improved Basket / Checkout performance
  • Tons of tweaks and bug-fixes

How to Upgrade

Magento upgrades are notoriously unpredictable, when undertaken using the Extensions Manager. This is usually due to a myriad of plug-ins, integrations and occasional instabilities brought about by years of gradual upgrades, enhancements and tweaks.

And, if you choose to do it yourself, budget plenty of time for resolving breakages, and plenty of hair-tearing moments trying to bring your precious flagship eCommerce site back online from your most recent backup (which hopefully is very recent indeed!)

The Layer 5 Approach

We will clone your installation, bring it onto our server estate, and perform the upgrade there, as a dry run.

Once complete we will await your signoff that all is well on the cloned version, and then repeat that process on your live server (of course taking all of the system backups and precautions that you would expect).

All this will be provided for a fixed fee, which we’ll post here once we’ve completed our own testing and confirming, which you will only pay once you’re happy.

Contact us when you’re ready to upgrade, and we’ll get you there!