We are excited to announce the release of Magento Commerce and Open Source 2.4.2, along with security-only patches 2.3.6-p1 and 2.4.1-p1. With important updates to security and performance, we strongly recommend that you take advantage and upgrade as soon as possible to ensure your sites remain secure, compliant, and optimized for the highest level of performance.
MAGENTO 2.4.2
Magento Commerce 2.4.2 includes several enhancements, quality improvements, and upgrades. Feature highlights of this release include:
B2B (Magento Commerce only)
Enhancements to the B2B buyer and seller purchase approval experience include support for online payments, which gives sellers the flexibility to accept purchasing policies regardless of payment method; and new GraphQL APIs to improve B2B headless capabilities.
PWA Studio
PWA Studio improvements enable merchants to accelerate the launch of international sites as high-performing PWAs with multi-language and multi-currency support. The latest 9.0.0 release also adds new “My Account” components for Venia, extensibility improvements, and performance optimizations. The added features and enhancements should result in faster time to market and a lower total cost of ownership with PWA Studio.
Interactive in-Product Guidance (Magento Commerce only)
Interactive In-Product Guidance has been added, providing your merchants with help and tips on better utilization of the product from within the Admin UI. Content such as new feature announcements, walk-through guides, onboarding information, tool tips and more will be available via this feature. If not already enabled, users must “opt-in” via the Admin UI to receive in-product guidance.
Security, Quality, and Performance
More than 35 security improvements and 280 performance issues have been included in 2.4.2, including but not limited to, all core cookies now support the SameSite attribute, malicious content warnings, expansion of GraphQL API, and scalability for eSKUs increased to 20x larger. Also, Media Gallery now supports web optimization for images to improve storefront performance.
ADDITIONAL Q1 2021 PRODUCT UPDATES
AWS S3 Remote Storage (Magento Commerce only)
Magento Commerce hosted in the cloud has added new functionality for Remote Storage allowing merchants to use third-party file storage systems with native support for AWS S3 storage. For more on configuring Remote Storage see our DevDocs.
Upgrade Compatibility Tool (Magento Commerce only)
This release includes the ALPHA version of the Upgrade Compatibility Tool. This tool enables merchants to compare their current production system to a new release. The tool returns warnings or issues that may exist between any custom modules or codes that require modifications prior to upgrading. For more information, see our Magento blog.
Split Database (Magento Commerce only)
Split Database functionality has been marked as deprecated in this release and will be removed in 2.5. For more information, see our DevBlog.
Vendor Bundled Extensions (VBE)
Amazon Pay VBE is marked as deprecated and will be removed in Magento 2.5. The extension and all functionalities will continue to be available to merchants through their extension on the Magento Marketplace.
To learn more about what’s included in this release and Magento Commerce 2.4.2, visit our blog, Prepare for Continued Digital Commerce Growth with Magento 2.4.2. You can also review the release notes to read more about the latest enhancements and visit our Security Bulletins for more information about security updates included in these new versions.
