Magento Community Edition 1.8 is here!

Substantial enhancements have been made in four key areas:

1) Improved tax calculations – now features a more efficient and accurate tax calculation system for VAT merchants, while rounding errors – so often confusing to buyers – have been corrected. Updates on Magento’s Knowledge Base webpage offer considerably more clarity and guidance on tax configurations.

2) Functionality – 350 functional improvements have been made in areas such as: the web store, the shopping cart, admin order creation, import and export operations, web API components and in payment methods as well.

3) Performance – boasting new, faster page-loading in the checkout process. In addition, cache adaptors have been optimised for single-server systems, while Redis cache adapters have been updated for multi-server systems. The 1.8 admin panel has also been significantly improved for larger product/order databases, while large numbers of tax codes (up to 35,000) can be uploaded without affecting overall performance.

4) Security – featuring strengthened security, users with limited privileges can be pre-empted from deleting the Magento installation, cryptographic methods used to store passwords have been improved, and additional Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protections significantly restrict the actions of fraudsters.

Updates to the alpha version of Magento Community Edition 1.8 include the removal of the need for a globally unique category and product URL keys, providing greater flexibility within your URL structures.

Fully committed to the Community Platform, Magneto are already in the process of advancing the next Community Edition for Magento, so we will keep you posted with further updates!