Update Magento 2.3.4

Magento has released the Major upgrades of its next version, and we are going to explain what new features and improvements have been included with this upgrade.

Platform upgrades

The following platform upgrades help enhance website security and PCI compliance.

• Enhancements to the message queue framework. Magento now supports the latest release of RabbitMQ v3.8, which is the third-party technology that underlies the Magento message queue framework.
• Improved page caching and session storage. This release has been tested on the latest stable release of Redis v5.0.6.
• Enhanced support for MariaDB 10.2. Before Magento 2.3.4, when using declarative schema with MariaDB 10.2, Magento threw an error indicating that the schema was not up-to-date after running bin/magento setup:upgrade. With this release, we have normalized the values returned by MariaDB, which allows system integrators to use declarative schema with both MySQL and MariaDB.

Performance boosts

Merchants and customers will see performance improvements as a result of these enhancements:

• Redundant non-cached requests to the server on catalog pages have been eliminated by refactoring the customer section invalidation mechanism and improving banner cache logic.
• PHTML files have been refactored to better support parsing by the bundling mechanism. Our new bundling mechanism now identifies all dependencies on JavaScript.
• Added the ability to disable statistic collecting for Reports module by default. A new configuration setting (System Configuration > General > Reports > General Options) allows merchants to completely or partially disable Magento Reports. (Statistics collection for the Reports module is disabled by default. Magento recommends disabling Reports functionality for performance reasons when this capability is not required.)

Infrastructure improvements

This release contains 250 enhancements to core quality, which improve the quality of the Framework and these modules: catalog, sales, PayPal, Elasticsearch, import, and CMS.

Merchant tool enhancements

Integration with Adobe Stock image galleries. The new bundled Adobe stock integration extension enables merchants to add high quality media assets to their website content without leaving the Magento Admin. Merchants can use the searchable interface in the Magento Media Gallery to explore, preview, license, and deploy stock images in website content.

Inventory Management

Inventory Management enhancements for this release include:

• Addressed a known performance issue that caused higher than expected loads on the database server in scenarios involving the shopping cart.
• Updated the Inventory Reservations CLI command to reduce memory usage when finding and compensating for missing reservations on large catalogs.
• Resolved multiple quality issues, including those related to credit memos, grouped products, source and stock mass actions.

Google Shopping ads Channel

Merchants can use Google Shopping ads Channel to integrate with their Google Merchant Center (GMC) and Google Ads accounts to advertise and sell Magento products.

Major Security Improvements:

This version upgrade includes more than 30 security enhancements.

• These improvements help in the closing of cross-site scripting and remote code execution vulnerabilities. There are no confirmed records for the attack of hackers related to this. Still, Magento identified some vulnerability that can potentially exploit and can get access to the administrative control to access customer information.
• Magento has advised taking appropriate actions such as IP whitelisting, Two-factor authentication, VPN, using a unique solution instead of /admin, and strong password so that attackers are not able to get the full control of your administrative access.
• Also, Magento has performed some fixes to core codes for security purposes. It includes the removal of custom layout updates and layout updates so that remote code execution can be removed.
• Magento has redesigned features of the content template to allow whitelisted variables that can be added in the template.

Improvements in GraphQL:

Magento, with the release of this version, includes better Graph coverage for search, cart functionality, and layered navigation. It has below listed mutations,

• Ability to link and retrieve cart on different devices.
• Now it is easy for GraphQL users to do price rendering which can be achieved on the storefront with the improved method of returning price.
• Product tax and level discount information issue is fixed.
• The cart now has promotion data.
• Now users can get the category data by name, slug, or ID.

So, these were the major improvements of the issues identified by Magento. These significant improvements are available with its latest version upgrade, which is Magento 2.3.4.