What is NEW in Magento CE 1.8.0.0 Magento Community Edition 1.8.0.0

SUMMARY Enhanced Tax Calculations Magento Community Edition 1.8 improves tax calculation accuracy for VAT merchants and eliminates potential rounding errors that can be confusing to buyers.

Functional Improvements Approximately 350 functional improvements is added that boost product quality in key areas, including the web store, shopping cart, admin order creation, import and export functionality, web API components, and payment methods.

Performance Improvements Magento Community Edition 1.8 enables a better shopping experience through faster page-loading in the checkout process and optimized cache adapters for single server systems, which minimize the number of cached pages that must be refreshed when product updates are made. The performance of the administrator panel is also improved for those of you with large product or order databases. Security Enhancements Through a number of enhancements, we also strengthened the security of Magento Community Edition.

Updates in Stable Release (I) The requirement to have globally unique category and product URL keys is removed. It helps greater flexibility in URL structures. (II) It incorporated the recent USPS API patch, DHL code updates, and the latest Redis back end cache code ( Cm_Cache_Backend_Redis ) (III) We have also included Cm_Redis_Session, a Redis session storage module.

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Comparison Table S. No 1

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FEATURES

MAGENTO CE 1.7

Magento CE 1.7.0.0 is not World Wide Web W3C compliant. Consortium (W3C)

Credentials / Passwords

Tax Calculation Rounding Error

MAGENTO CE 1.8 Magento CE 1.8.0.0 is W3C compliant.

Web browsers are able to save Magento Admin panel or web store account credentials.

Web browsers are no longer be able to save Magento Admin panel or web store account credentials.

In case of prices end in (9,7,3) and percentage based discounts. We got price mismatch error in Paypal payment method after round off.

All product price information on which taxation is based are rounded to two digits of precision regardless of how many digits of precision have been loaded into the database .

Example: ( Example: Selling Price = £9.99 $10.24 instead of $10.2385 Tax = 20% Original Price = £8.325 (I) If Round down, Price send to Paypal = £8.32 Customer payment = £9.98 (II) If Round up, Price send to Paypal = £8.33, Customer payment = £10.00

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Whatever you send, you can't get Paypal to charge the customer £9.99 including tax Performance was the major issue in Now Redis cache module is added to CE 1.7 to look for the alternatives Improve Performance

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Redis Cache Module

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FEATURES

MAGENTO CE 1.7

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Number of Tax codes

Magento Performance was affected when we add more number of tax codes

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Special Characters in we can not use special characters Product URL in a product URL key.

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Now Magento can load a huge number of tax codes (35,000 approx.) without impacting performance. Now we can use special characters in a product URL key.

Site map URL

After a customer visits the sitemap After a customer visits the sitemap, web stores URLs are prepended by web stores URLs are no longer prepended by /sitemap/catalog/string. /sitemap/catalog/string.

Free Shipping Option

Free Shipping Option is available

Free Shipping Option is no longer available to a customer during checkout if the option was Disabled by an administrator.

Order Cancellation using the Admin Panel.

You can not cancel an order using the Admin Panel.

You can now cancel an order using the Admin Panel.

Cancellation of Paypal payment

The contents of a shopping cart are The contents of a shopping cart are affected by canceling a PayPal Unaffected by canceling a PayPal payment. payment.

Session ID

Session ID don't change after registration

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MAGENTO CE 1.8

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Session ID change after registration for security to counter Cross Site Request Forgery ( CSRF ) which means an impostor can no longer hijack a newly created customer’s session and perform actions on their behalf.

1. IMPROVED TAX CALCULATION Enhanced Tax calculation algorithms have been implemented in this Edition. Several issues confronted in the previous editions like Tax calculation on orders with discounted products, rounding errors, fixed Product tax, etc. have been resolved. Tax Calculation methods have been updated to support the changing tax regulations of Canada. Taxation in Canada Tax is the area in Magento CE 1.8.0.0 that’s had the biggest treatment with a huge number of changes and fixes. It’s now a lot more intelligent and if the administrator sets tax up in such a way that it may introduce rounding errors then Magento will warn them and provide recommendations on how to fix the issue. Bundled product types have previously been susceptible to rounding issues, especially when coupled with tiered pricing – this has now been resolved in the new version. As well as that, tax that is calculated on many-quantity line items should now function as expected. There’s also a lot more tweaks under the hood that should ensure tax is more accurate in certain conditions. Problem in Magento CE 1.7.2.0: Magento prices can be defined as inclusive of tax (which in the UK is 20% at the moment). If you want to calculate the price of a product, without that tax, sometimes the result is not a nice round number. For example, if you are selling a product at £9.99, then the exact price without tax is £8.325. Paypal, unfortunately, won't allow prices set to three decimal places. This, on the face of it, makes sense - you can't charge people fractions of pennies, after all. Here's where the problem is, though - what price do you send to Paypal? If you round down, and send Paypal a price of £8.32, then when tax is added the customer is charged £9.98. If you round up to £8.33, Paypal adds tax and the customer is charged £10.00. Whatever you send, you can't get Paypal to charge the customer £9.99 including tax. Whichever price you send, Paypal adds up the line items, sees that the total doesn't match the order total (which you send through separately), and rejects the order with a message saying "Transaction refused because of an invalid argument", "Item total is invalid" or "The totals of the cart item amounts do not match order amounts". ( The problem lies with rounding, especially if you are using percentage based discounts, but also if prices end in 9,7,3. ) Error: Transaction refused because of an invalid argument. See additional error messages for details. The totals of the cart item amounts do not match order amounts. SOLVED : This Rounding Problem is solved in Magento CE 1.8.0.0

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2. PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS The checkout process performance has been hugely enhanced. Loading of the progress information for the current checkout step only will lead to a better checkout performance. Large database lookups will be speedier than before in this Magento Community Edition. Most importantly now Magento can load a huge number of tax codes (35,000 approx.) without impacting performance. One of the major gripes with Magento has always been its inability to handle large product catalogues. Version 1.8 has taken several steps to rectify this; including a new way of limiting how Magento performs large database lookups and protection against database deadlocks. There are also changes in how Magento handles sites with a large amount of tax codes – now you can have over 35,000 individual tax codes without adversely affecting the performance of the website – perfect for stores that have a global presence. The checkout is another area that’s had improvements to its speed, now only information relating to the current step is loaded and several unnecessary calls have been eliminated – which should ensure customers get through the checkout a lot faster. Key Improvements : 1. Improvements of the speed of page loading during checkout process. 2. Optimized cache adapters for single-server systems,minimizing the refreshment of caches when product is updated 3. Speedier large database lookups. 4. Improvements of the backend when a store has huge amount of products or tax codes You can even load a large number of tax rates (3,000+) without any impact to performance. 5. Add Redis cache module from Colim Mollenhour

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3. FUNCTIONAL ENHANCEMENTS More than 350 functional improvements have made in this release. Fixes have been done on the key areas like web store, shopping cart, admin order creation, credit memo, import and export functionality, promotional price rule, web API components and payment methods. Community Edition 1.8 is now World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) compliant. some of the key improvements are: • A customers’ account created date will now report the correct date. • Products that are already in a customer’s wish list will no longer disappear after that specific product is edited by an administrator. • For people who like standards – Magento is now World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) compliant.

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4. SECURITY ENHANCEMENTS Security features of Community Edition have been enhanced too. Web browsers will no longer be able to save Magento Admin panel or web store account credentials. The cryptographic methods used to store passwords have also been improved. Some key measures have been taken to prevent session fixation attacks. Magento as an eCommerce platform has always been relatively secure and with 1.8 comes several security improvements. The major changes are: • The admin panel will no longer store usernames or passwords. • The cryptographic method that is used to store passwords has been improved for greater security. • Improvements in security to counter Cross Site Request Forgery; which means an impostor can no longer hijack a newly created customer’s session and perform actions on their behalf. Highlight :  Fixed Session fixation vulnerability  Fixed Oauth attacks  Fixed Remote code execution  Block attackers to get access to billing information  Block web browsers to save user and password from backend  Additional CSRF protection  Session ID change after registration to prevent man in the middle  Cryptographic method to store password has been improved

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