Magento Community Edition 1.8 Now Available!

Magento announced on Wednesday the availability of Magento Community Edition (CE) 1.8.0.0, now available for download and upgrade. This is the first release in over a year to the community edition, improves tax calculations, boosts product quality and stability, enhances performance, and advances security for the rapidly growing Magento community.

Key highlights include:

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. Knowledge Base updates also provide more guidance on tax configurations and Canadian tax requirements, enabling you to more fully benefit from the native Magento tax engine.

Functional Improvements

Approximately 350 functional improvements 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 1.8 administrator panel is also improved for those of you with large product or order databases.

Security Enhancements

Through a number of enhancements, the security of Magento Community Edition has also been strengthened. A full list of enhancements is available in the release notes.

Updates to the Alpha Release

A few new updates were made to the alpha version of Magento Community Edition 1.8. We removed the requirement to have globally unique category and product URL keys, giving you greater flexibility in your URL structures. We also incorporated the recent USPS API patch, DHL code updates, and the latest Redis backend cache code, now called Cm_Cache_Backend_Redis. We have also included Cm_RedisSession, a Redis session storage module.

Download

Click here to download Magento Community Edition 1.8 and check out the full release notes here.

Please note

If you have any questions or would like assistance with upgrading your store to Magento CE 1.8, feel free to contact our support team. We will be glad to help!

As always, we DO NOT recommend applying the upgrade directly to a live production site. Please ensure the necessary backups are created upgrading or contact our sales department for our professional Magento upgrade service.