Magento 2.3 was discussed at length at the recent Imagine conference in Las Vegas, outlining a few of the key new features which this major release will bring. In short, this is a potent progression and the M2 platform which packs significant new functionality which drives the rampant innovation forward.

Multi-Source Inventory

Like so many of the best features of the Magento platform (1 and 2), Multi-Source Inventory (MSI) was born in the community with some 65 contributors. MSI is a feature that has been requested time and again in Magento and from M2.3 it will be part of the core.

MSI will allow merchants to manage multiple stock positions – such as warehouses in different countries, and map these locations, individually or as aggregated values to each store view and sales channel in your Magento instance.

This will be a seriously powerful native addition for multi-channel, multi-national retailers.

Page Builder

Some early adopters of Magento2 will know all about Bluefoot CMS; the incredible page building module for M2 which tore up the rule book on managing CMS content in Magento. The good people of Magento recognised the quality and usefulness of the module and from M2.3 (Commerce) it is becoming part of the core offering.

The native Tiny MCE editor has been with us for a long while and its limitations are pretty stark. Bluefoot – or Magento Page Builder as it will now be known allows merchants to quickly and easily build responsive feature rich CMS pages without needing any html or css knowledge, using an intuitive drag and drop system.

Note this will be a Commerce-only feature, but Open Source is due an upgrade of Tiny MCE which will also bring some light improvements to content management for OS users too.

PWA Studio

Progressive Web App (PWA) is a website which appears and runs like a native smartphone app but doesn’t need to be installed. PWA is a concept developed by Google back in 2015 as a solution for users with patchy or slow internet connections on mobile.

From M2.3, Magento will offer PWA Studio which is a suite of everything you need to build Progressive Web Apps with Magento2 for use anywhere. Time will tell how significant this will be, but impressive as always that Magento leads the way in making this functionality available to Magento devs and merchants.

PHP 7.2

With PHP 7.0 approaching end-of-life, Magento 2.3 will not be compatible with PHP 7.0 and gets a bump in compatibility with PHP 7.2. This is a great step forward in security and performance for the platform but does have a downside for merchants running Magento 2.0 or 2.1, as neither support PHP 7.1, meaning your migration to M2.3 will need to handled carefully with a PHP version upgrade mid Magento upgrade. Get in touch if you’d like some advise or support in upgrading your Magento store.