Magento News

Magento News Weekly 027: Magento 2.1.1, KnockoutJS In Magento 2, Holiday Dashboard for Merchants and more

Magento News Weekly

Good day Magenticians!

Hot off the press, this is your weekly Magento news round up. We bring you news, tutorials and more to keep you up to date on the latest happenings in the Magento world.

I have to say I’m quite spoiled for choice when it comes to which articles to include in the round up. This is because the Magento community is so helpful to each other, that a lot of information-rich articles get written. If you want your post to be included, let us know.

Now, let’s take a look at what you might love reading over the weekend.

The holiday season is approaching. It is an annual opportunity for Ecommerce stores to gloriously blast-off into a future that heralds higher sales, better conversion rate, and a consolidated base of brand-loyal customers. Magento Commerce has come up with a new cloud analytics feature which lets you improve your store’s performance during the holiday season in five key areas: Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention, Productivity, and Self/Competitor Analysis. Read Magento Commerce Introduces Holiday Dashboard for Merchants to learn how Holiday Dashboard can help you improve profitability during the crucial holiday season.

Are you using Magento CE 2.1.1? Or you might be considering updating to the latest version. The official release notes are out. After a round of backward incompatibility issue fixes, in the latest iteration, static assets are the focus. That means images, JS, LESS files, CSS files. The update addresses eStore pages such as pricing, and shopping cart. It also improves performance by introducing preview of multiple variations of a configurable product, static asset deployment optimizations, creation of product variants and so much more. Type casting of attributes, introduction of Braintree as a payment method and many other miscellaneous changes have been made. Check out the notes to find out how to upgrade or install, and read more in detail about the changes.

Here’s one for the favorites folder of your browser. Andrew Smart has written a concise and useful post about Filtering a Payment Method in Magento. He explains how to change the relevant variable in the standard class communicate with the payment check event, which allows you to allow or disallow any type of payment method on your eStore. Andrew goes into the code of config.xml and model/observer.php to achieve this.

I’m sure all your production environment sites are using merged CSS/JS (If not, what are you waiting for!). You might think you’ve done everything to optimize your Magento performance. But wait up, Brian Holecko presents The One Technique to Further Boost Magento Performance. I bet you didn’t think of this ;) The problem most sites have is that page-specific CSS/JS is being bundled with the site-wide CSS/JS bundle. Repeatedly, the site-wide files are re-downloaded. Find out how to perform an operation on these conjoined twins and let your site load faster by reading Brian’s article.

You know very well that the user-experience on your checkout page, and even product pages, is vital to conversions. Let’s suppose you have a text field to input the quantity of items, and now you want to change into a slick quantity increment button. Fayyaz Khattak shows you how to do that in How To Use KnockoutJS In Magento 2. He explains the utility of KnockoutJS, then teaches how to create a Magento 2 module, what changes to make in the addtocart.phtml, binding component with front-end HTML, modifying paths, and more. He takes you to the last stage by showing how to activate your module.

Now, let’s mention some community news.

UK and Ireland folks! There’s a Magento North East – September 2016 happening. If you’ll be around Newcastle on 5th September, 2016, be there! The topic on the agenda is Bitcoins for Ecommerce. Given the niche market for Bitcoin online payments, this meeting will help you to learn how to add this payment method to your online store.

Ever wanted to be a pioneer in the field of Ecommerce? Here’s your chance. The Innovation Think Tank in Meet Magento Association is inviting all shades of Magenticians interested in Ecommerce startups to put their heads together and, well, think. But it doesn’t end there. Study groups will be formed around specific areas and the teams will work concrete improvement of the Magento ecosystem. Apply now!

That’s it for this week.

Have a blessed weekend. Until next Friday, take care!

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