This month, Magento released the newest version of Magento Enterprise Edition (1.14.1), which usually means the Community Edition update was not far behind and today, it arrived!

So, what’s the skinny with the latest and greatest CE version of our favourite ecommerce platform then? Well, quite a lot actually.

Server Support

When Magento 1.9 was released, it began Magento support for PHP 5.4. CE 1.9.1 now supports PHP 5.5 – and also supports MySQL 5.6. This means that you can upgrade to the latest releases to enjoy increased site speed and scalability – reducing memory usage and providing enchanced debugging tools.

Configurable Swatches

The new swatch capabilities allow you to make products more appealing by offering speedier access to attributes such as fabrics or colours in a swatch format rather than drop down. This is something Amasty has been doing really well in their 'Improved Navigation' module for the last 5 years (very well I might add), but it's great to see the functionality become part of the core.

Google Universal Analytics

Providing merchants with deeper customer insights and access to ongoing feature updates – Magento now supports Google Universal Analytics straight out of the box.

Responsive Design Improvements

Default email templates are now fully responsive and various other areas are now included in the RWD theme, including: gift registries, downloadable products, multiple wish lists, add-to-cart by SKU, and private sales.

More improvements

Magento 1.9.1 also includes a multitude of bug fixes and updates – some key highlights:

  • Improved indexing
  • Magento connect now defaults to HTTPS rather than FTP
  • Changing an admin password now requires you to put in your existing password
  • Gift cards are no longer issued if the payment method fails
  • Magento correctly calculates the Daylight Savings Time offset
  • The CMS handles HTML5 tags properly
  • Links in the sitemap have the proper search engine optimized (SEO) URLs
  • Extension developers can now create an extension with a dash character in the name
  • Merchants can install those extensions without issues

You can check out the full list here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/ce19-later-release-notes#ce19-1910-highlights.