Magento 2.3 Release Date is November 28 (28/11/2018). This Magento 2.3 release will have new and significant functionality and improvements.
Here are key features will be packing in Magento 2.3:
New functionality
The Magento 2.3 version will bring several powerful tools to simplify web store development, those are PWA Studio and Page builder.
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Progressive Web App (PWA)
Magento 2.3 will fully support the features of PWA (progressive web app). As we all may know, PWA will be a key thing in any developers’ mindset from now on. To develop it, Magento has been going ahead beginning with the development of PWA Studio – a powerful suite of tools that allow you to develop, deploy and maintain a PWA storefront on Magento 2.
PWA is the latest frontend technology which a web app that uses modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like experience to users. As usual, PWAs are built on a JavaScript framework like React, Vue.js or AngularJS for handling data and displaying it; and communicate with a backend via (Magento 2) REST API.
To get more information, read official Magento notes here.
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Page Builder
Finally, we have CMS feature on this no-user-friendly platform. In Magento 2.3, the requested Page Builder is added.
The Page Builder function enables merchants to create customized pages without having to write code. In fact, this function is the integration of current simple drag-and-drop interface based on the revised Bluefoot CMS extension.
Security
Magento keeps improving security and this time provides tools for control over caching and user verification.
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Google reCAPTCHA
One more security enhancement is the introduction of the Google reCAPTCHA service with its inbuilt mechanism for detecting malicious and SPAM-related activity. The reCAPTCHA tool will help merchants keep key pages secure from bots:
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Two Factor Authentication
Magento 2.3 also adds two-factor authentication to protect against malicious attempts to access your Magento admin panel. This additional layer of security has become standard practice among many web applications.
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Cache-Management ACL
Another useful improvement in Magento 2.3 is a granular cache management ACL. You can control exactly which user roles can view and delete the Magento caches.
This feature is handy when you have new team members who might need time to fully interact with the system cache. Under this circumstance, you can control what level of Cache management a given team member can perform.
Performance
Five enhancements below will improve a Magento web store stability and efficiency, as well as speed up data processing.
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PHP 7.2 support and libsodium
Magento 2.3 drops the support for PHP 7.0 and turns to PHP 7.2. This change will bring many advantages, such as higher security, better performance, and the access to the latest PHP features for developers (nullable types, class constant visibility, and others). With no mcrypt in PHP 7.2, the libsodium module will now be used for encryption.
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Asynchronous and Bulk Web API
Magento 2.3 also will bring to the table Asynchronous API, which will allow making requests without waiting for the response from the server. To check the progress of requests by ID, users will have a separate status reporting API at their disposal.
This feature is mainly to the advantage of big websites that integrate with third-party systems, such as ERP or CRM. With no Asynchronous API in place, bulk operations took quite a lot of time. The Magento system could be overloaded, several requests could fail and require repeat actions. Now, such things as customer, order, or inventory data import will no longer be a problem.
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Message Queue
One more feature for asynchronous communication between Magento and third-party systems, Message queue will be extended from Magento Commerce to the Magento 2.3 version.
This innovation is based on RabbitMQ and allows reducing loads on web servers with help of a message broker. This way Magento will be able to communicate with third-party systems, like ERP or CRM, more intensively and respond to requests faster.
To get more information about RabbitMQ, read official Magento notes here.
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GraphQL language
GraphQL API language is the latest and also biggest moves in Magento 2.3. GraphQL is a data query language developed by Facebook and released in 2015.
Magento 2.3 implements GraphQL as an alternative API endpoint in addition to REST and SOAP. GraphQL opens up data retrieval possibilities for PWA by allowing to request exactly the data that you need and also giving the ability to join data in a single request.To put it another way, you can efficiently get smaller amounts of data and to make fewer API requests. This is an advantage over a traditional SOAP / REST request which always returns all data associated with an endpoint, and needs at least one request per resource.So, using GraphQL allows a Magento PWA to be quick even on slow mobile network connections.
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Declarative Database Schema
Magento 2.3 introduces a new approach – declarative database schema, allowing developers to define database structures and changes in XML files, instead of defining with install scripts. Magento 2.3 will convert the XML schema files into SQL statements and perform them.
The new declarative schema provides a big advantage: rollback support. This means you can roll back database changes you implement on a module or functionality to a previous version.
Extra Options
Finally, the new version will include two must-haves that were often provided by paid extensions; now, Magento users will enjoy them out-of-the-box.
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ElasticSearch
Just like Message Queue, ElasticSearch v5. will soon be extended to Magento Open Source as a default search engine. Out-of-the-box access to a powerful search experience and attribute filtering will call into question the need for any related extensions.
Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Lucene library. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents.
Elasticsearch is developed in Java and is released as open source under the terms of the Apache License.
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Multi-Source Inventory (MSI)
MSI allows merchant to manage all inventory sources without any third-party extensions or platforms. This functionality enables stock management in multiple locations so that merchants can properly reflect their physical warehouses in Magento 2.3 system for fulfillment.
Additionally, MSI helps to improve checkout performance by incorporating a reservation system. Reservation refers to a mechanism that reserves some product quantity in stock instead of automatically decrementing inventory when the order is placed. This keeps inventory amount (product quantity) up-to-date without locking at the time of checkout and eliminates re-indexing and performance issues during peak order times.
Besides, it also introduces better import/export process for inventory to speed up integration with an external ERP system.
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WYSIWYG Upgrade
The WYSIWYG editor (or TinyMCE) is upgraded from version 3 to version 4 in Magento 2.3. It brings new enhancements for a highly customizable WYSIWYG: Widgets, variables and media gallery are implemented as plugins and can be defined globally or on per shop instance.
