Magento 2.4: Improvements to Core Quality

Released on July 28, Magento 2.4 is all about enhancements related to security, performance, and quality features following a drastic surge in online commerce.

Security Enhancements  

• With this release, the Authorize.Net and Braintree payment method integrations have been removed from the core code. Merchants should migrate to the official extensions that are available on the Magento Marketplace.
• Securing your Magento Admin account-Two-factor authentication (2FA) is now required for the Magento Admin. Admin users must first configure their 2FA before logging into the Admin through either the UI or a web API. 2FA is enabled by default and cannot be disabled. This extra step of authentication makes it harder for malicious users to log in to the Admin without authorization.
• Support for new security.txt file. This file is an industry-standard file on the server that helps security researchers report potential security issues to site administrators.

Platform Upgrades 

• PHP 7.4 support was announced whereas PHP 7.1 and 7.2 support are deprecated.
• Support for PHP Unit 9.x and deprecation of PHP Unit 6.5.
• Elasticsearch 7.6.x support.
• MySQL 8.0 support.
• Removal of the MySQL catalogue search engine.
• MariaDB 10.4 support.
• Migration of dependencies on Zend Framework to the Laminas project
• Removal of the core integration of the Signified fraud protection code.

Infrastructure Improvements 

• Deprecation and removal of the Web Set Up Wizard. Now, one must use the command line to install or upgrade Magento 2.4.0.
• Seller-assisted shopping. This feature allows merchants to view the storefront on behalf of their customers. Customers opt to allow storefront access to their accounts.

Backend 

• Email templates (Admin > Marketing > Communications > Email Templates) can now be previewed from the Admin when JavaScript minification is enabled. Previously, when you tried to preview an email template, the Email Preview popup window was empty.
• Magento no longer duplicates SEO data such as URL key, meta title, meta keywords, and meta description when you duplicate a product.

Catalogue 

• You can now successfully edit a configurable product with many variants (approximately 5,000) from the Admin.

 CMS Content 

• Magento now lets you create CMS blocks with identical names if the blocks are assigned to different store views.

Customer 

• Customers who are subscribed to newsletters as a guest are no longer unsubscribed after registering for a new account.
• Magento 2.4 now uses a new PHP Session for each change of password.

Frameworks 

• php bin/magento cron:runno longer processes items from the change log table multiple times. Previously, when you had more than 100000 new versions in the change log table, actions could be called several times for the same entity id.

Magento 2.4 General Fixes 

• Merchants can now set an expiration date on Admin user accounts.
• The Customer module no longer has a dependency on the Review module. Previously, you could not disable the Review module due to this dependency.
• A store’s Admin URL no longer redirects to the storefront URL when these two URLs differ.
• The TinyMCE4 editor now supports all HTML tags.
• Magento now displays the Credit memo button after the partial refund of an order. Previously, Magento did not display this button after you created a partial refund, and you could not create a credit memo for the rest of the order.

Import Export 

• Magento no longer creates duplicate SKUs in the Admin when products are imported by .csv file.
• Import no longer fails when the imported configurable attribute includes an equal sign (=) in its value.

Performance 

• Merchants can now use lazy loading to load images.
• Dashboard charts have been migrated to the chart.js library.
• The performance of operations that are run on large catalogues that contain many product attributes (on the scale of 3,000 – 23000 options) has been improved by the refactoring of how attribute option arrays are built.

Sales 

• Magento 2.4 now correctly calculates refunds for orders that include discounts. Previously, Magento incorrectly calculated the shipping tax and shipping discount, and the refunded total did not match the total paid.
• Re-orders are now disabled as expected when a merchant disables the Admin > Store > Configuration > Sales > Reorder > Allow Order.

Search 

• Magento now renders the <and > symbols correctly in storefront catalogue search strings.

Translation and Locales 

• The es_USSpanish (United States) locale is now supported.
• The length of the locale column for directory_country_region_name has been increased from 8 to 16 to support locales such as zh_Hans_CN.

UI 

• The table quote column customer_notenow uses type text as expected. Previously, it used type varchar(255)
• You can now update the value of a downloadable product’s sample and link title by enabling the Use default
• The layout of the Admin Billing Address/Shipping Address page has been refactored to meet Magento Admin form display conventions.
• Prompt models no longer carry out a confirmation action when a user clicks on the modal overlay.

URL rewrites 

• Customers who change the language on a CMS page can now successfully navigate to the store view they’ve selected. Previously, Magento displayed a 404 error.
• We’ve added a check to prevent URL redirects if the request path is the same as the target path.
• URL rewrite operations no longer remove a query string from a URL when the URL has a trailing slash.

Web API framework 

• Corrected issues with the POST /rest/default/async/bulk/V1/orders
• Corrected issues with the POST /rest/default/async/bulk/V1/products
• The getListmethod has been refactored to retrieve the is_subscribed extension attribute.
• Updating customer information through /V1/customers/:idno longer resets the group_id
• You can now use POST /V1/guest-carts/:cartId/items to add products to a specific cart.
• You can now use the PUT /V1/cmsPage/:idendpoint to save a CMS page title without changing the values of other fields.
• The result of GET /V1/orders/items/{id}now includes an extension attribute element that includes gift message data.

Magento 2.4 Wishlist 

• A wishlist now works as expected when it is enabled at the store-view level and disabled at the global level. Previously, when these settings were in place, adding a product to a wishlist resulted in a 404 error.
• We’ve improved the error message that is displayed when a customer tries to share their wishlist with more email addresses than is permitted.
• Customers can now add to a wishlist both a simple product that is part of grouped products and the same simple product with a different quantity.

WYSIWYG 

• The WYSIWYG image uploader now uses pub/media/wysiwyg as the storage root. Previously, the uploaded used pub/media as its storage root.

Check out the previous Magento version 2.3.5 and if you are looking forward to migrating to Magento 2.4 don’t forget to consult our certified developers and functional experts.