Magento 1.4.2.0 Released - Upgrade Magento to 1.4.2.0

Magento have just released the latest version of Magento Community Edition: 1.4.2.0

This continues the 1.4 branch of Magento. If you are still running Magento 1.3 or earlier you definitely need to be upgrading onto the 1.4 branch, there are so many improvements. Now that this version has come out there has never been a better time to upgrade your store to the 1.4 branch.

If you need help getting your store upgraded, get in touch with us - we have done loads of upgrades from the smooth to the painful - but all have been successful in the end.

The major highlights are the default installation of The Find feed functionality. No doubt this is thanks to a sizeable donation from The Find, but hey it won’t do any harm and might even bring in some more sales.

The other thing to note is that the awaited new version of Magento Connect Manager has not been included in the final release despite being in the release candidates. Presumably some critical issues were found with the system so they decided not to roll it out.

Other things of note in the release notes we spotted are:

Upgraded Zend Framework to version 1.10.8 Not the very latest of Zend Framework (1.11.1 as of writing) but a more up to date version. Zend Framework is the foundation of Magento.

For Invoices, Shipment, Credit Memos added possibility to show admin comments at user frontend (checkboxes “Visible on Frontend” in admin interface This is a familiar feature on other carts such as osCommerce. The ability to set some comments as customer visible so they can track the process of their order from their account area on the front of the web site.

Add Shopping Cart API Not yet detailed in the API documentation, presumably this will allow programmatic creation of shopping cart sessions so you can get a shopping basket filled up via an external system and then pipe the customer through straight into the checkout process. This will open up all kinds of customisation possibilities.

Added functionality to disable dashboard charts in backend This will save on server resources and page load times in the admin for those hosting on less powerful environments or simply looking for the best performance.

Added favicon manager under System > Configuration > Design > HTML Head Such a common mistake with Magento sites is to leave the standard favicon in there - the famous red M. This should make it very easy to set a custom favicon (though it was never that hard in the first place).

Upgrade your Magento If you want to get your Magento store upgraded to the latest version, get in touch with Edmonds Commerce today.