Magento 2.2.5: new features overview

Magento has recently released a new version of Open Source and Commerce packages with 150 improvements around performance, security, shipping, cataloguing, etc. After two months of hard work and dedication, this article will look through the enhancements Magento has made and explain why it’s worth upgrading to the new release.

Core code improvements

These improvements have noticeably increased performance for huge stores.

1. Now both catalogue search full-text indexer, and category product indexer can be run at the same time by store view.
2. The catalogue full-text indexer was refactored so that indexing performance increased by up to 15% for catalogues which have more than 600,000 products, or more than 500 configurable options.
3. The behaviour of swatch product attributes was improved, increasing performance by up to 31% for catalogues with more than 500 configurable options.

Community contributions

Developers fixed a checkout issue and improved simple product sorting.

1. Buyers can now create an account from the Order Confirmation page. Back in the old days, Magento showed an error when somebody tried to do that. This feature has a significant impact on business since it converts accidental buyers into regular customers.
2. Coupon codes that exclude bundle products are applied correctly now. Previously, Magento applied the coupons but didn’t rule out bundle products.
3. Magento now sorts simple products with promo price rule by a regular price. It helps to avoid a mess when a discount is off. The same refers to simple products with custom options.

Magento Shipping

Shipping enhancements increase customer convenience and provide new capabilities for store owners.

1. Merchants have the ability to choose carriers who will return goods and can even send a return label along with a forward fulfilment.
2. Customers can now specify a convenient place for product delivery, whereas the only previous option was a residence
3. Managing loads of shipments becomes easier with batch processing as it allows the grouping of shipments which can then be processed automatically.

Magento 2.2.5 has additional enhancements which increase store safety. There used to be such vulnerabilities as an authenticated admin user, remote code execution, cross-site scripting, and cross-site request forgery. These segments previously allowed intruders to potentially access customer information, or take over admin sessions. Although such attacks haven’t happened yet, Magento recommends upgrading to the newest patch.

We considered only the most important changes in this article. There a lot of other improvements such as hiding out-of-stock configurable products from search results, caching popular search results for a quick response on popular queries, etc. If you want to see the whole list of fixes, you can check it out here.