Magento 1.8

The new Magento 1.8 Community Edition comes with numerous new features and improvements that are hidden "under the hood" of the currently most popular eCommerce system.

The focus of the new version is on improved performance for database transactions and caching, a revision of the tax calculations and numerous bug fixes.

We have briefly summarized the most important new features for you below.

Magento 1.8 introduces a number of improvements to further increase the performance of the store.

• The way in which large database queries are performed has been limited.
• The checkout process has been accelerated by the following individual measures:
  • RSS cache cleanups have been eliminated if RSS functionality has been disabled
  • The localization function for transaction emails, such as order confirmations, now first checks whether the customer's language matches that of the Magento store.
  • Only the process information required for the respective step in the checkout process is now loaded.
• A large number (up to 35,000) of different control codes can now be assigned to the Magento store without any loss of performance.
• Caching for single server systems has been improved
• The cache adapter for Redis Server for multi-server systems has been updated.
• Many database deadlocks have been fixed

As part of the new Magento 1.8 Community Edition, the tax calculation has been completely revised. The following sub-areas have been revised:

• General tax calculation (General Tax Notes)
• Rounding error fixes
• Fixed taxes on products (Fixed Product Tax (FPT) Fixes)
• Discount calculations
• Display errors

The details of the respective corrections in the individual sub-areas are explained in more detail below.

To make Magento 1.8 even more secure, numerous new functions have been added and some potentially exploitable security gaps have been closed:

• Errors are no longer displayed for new Magento installations.
• The access rights for individual users can now be limited so that the Magento installation cannot be deleted.
• User data and passwords for the Magento Admin Panel can no longer be saved in the browser.
• Magento 1.8 now has additional protection against Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF), so that a fraudster can no longer take over newly created customer accounts and make transactions on behalf of the customer.
• Attacks that use OAuth to gain access to sensitive customer data are now prevented.
• A vulnerability that allowed user accounts to be taken over during the registration process has been closed.
• A remote execution vulnerability has been closed.
• A vulnerability that allowed access to payment information has been closed.
• The methods for encrypted storage of passwords in the store have been improved.