M2 release date and main features

[kingofheaven]

Can you tell me about M2 main features and main changes from M1? When will M2 be released?

[Dmitry_Fedyuk · Accepted solution]

Due to many technology improvements (the greatest are the plugins and the modern PHP interpreter) the extensions for Magento 2 are able to play much more nice with the each other and with the core.

So it reduces the risk of extension conflicts and gives a store owner an ability to continuously improve the store with extensions with much less danger to break something already working.

Surely Magento 2 will be released this year 

[akent99]

The official release date is Q4 2015, as it has been for about 2 years now. There have been a few public places now where "November 2015" was mentioned. And we just had a RC shipped. So it will be released "Real Soon Now".

Regarding features, there are whole webinars on this topic!  For developer information tou can check out my blog at http://alankent.wordpress.com for ones that appealed to me in particular, as well as the Magento 2 developer hub page http://magento.com/developers/magento2 and online documentation http://devdocs.magento.com/.

If you are after more of an overview, you could try browsing the Imagine conference videos from last year, or frankly do a google search and you will find a range of blogs, videos, etc talking about Magento 2 these days. It depends as to what you are after exactly - I would browse to see if any address your questions. For example, http://alankent.me/2014/05/17/magento-2-goals/ from a while back talked about the general goals of M2 (which are still valid).

[kingofheaven]

Thanks for your answers. Then, can store owners install any extension without compatibility issues? Now Magento is an independent company, how will that change M2 development and updates direction?

[Dmitry_Fedyuk]

In general, of course, "reduces the risk" has a different meaning than "without".

[akent99]

M2 has a lot more tools to reduce the probability of extension conflicts. The replacement Magento Connect when available also involves more reviews of the code before it can hit the market. But it is not possible to say that two extensions will never overlap/conflict. If you load up two checkout modules for example, I cannot say both will work afterwards. So I could give a marketing answer of "it will be great", or I can give an Engineering answer of "it will be better, but a gurantee of zero problems cannot be given".

As to your other question, how will it change development, there are no immediate plans to change development practices. Certainly the web store will stay open source on GItHub. We are not planning any changes on that front. It is full steam ahead.  What is more likely to change is around providing other (optional) offerings. For example, we have an order management system now, and an iPad app for in store interactions (for sales associates). So there will be new offerings - but I don't expect anything to change on the web store - other than we have invested so much in the M2 platform over the last few years things will change in terms of we are going to throw a lot more effort into product functionality, so you can expect features to start coming through more rapidly as we move forward.