Hi everyone! :)

[m_j7]

Hello everyone!

I though as my first post here I should say hello and introduce myself.

I work for a New Zealand based ecommerce company. We use a Magento site that we are looking to develop quite quickly and as a team we are trying to find our feet We currently have a Magento 1.9 site and one of the projects we have to look forward to will be updating this in the near future. Ideally we would like to have the development capability in house as the website will be one of our companies main products

We really look forward to being a part of this forum and community. Thank you so much in advance!

M

[Robert Rand]

Welcome to the forums! It's a great place to ask questions and share experiences and feedback.

Another great resource is https://magento.com/technical-resources
, which includes documentation on much of Magento's standard features and functionality.

Additionally, you can view "known" issues with the Magento 2 platform on   Github: https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues

You can learn about the forum guidelines here: https://community.magento.com/t5/News-Announcements/Guidelines-for-Using-the-Magento-Forums/m-p/1519...

and if you ever get stuck, just ask a question, or reach out to @sherrie who oversees this forum.

In regards to upgrading your Magento 1.9 site, you'll want to make sure that it's currently patched and up-to-date so that you're not a "sitting duck" security-wise. This includes ensuring that your Magento instance, Magento Extensions, and your Hosting Environment are all up-to-date.

Then, you'll likely want to look at migrating to Magento 2 since Magento 1 goes End of Life (EOL) in June of 2020. This means Magento will no longer be distributing security patches and software updates. Moving to Magento 2 involves a full replatforming, so it can be a pretty extensive project. There are tons of materials now available that explain this process from a high-level, from podcasts and videos, to eBooks and guides, to simple blog posts. If you're ever interested in such materials, I'd be happy to recommend some. 

[m_j7]

Hi Robert,

Thank you very much for the welcome and useful info! We'll take a look through your recommended links and if you could share any other recommendations that would be great thank you

Is Magento 2 a big improvement?

[Robert Rand]

Magento 1 was first launched in 2008. It's had a long life, but technologically, it's getting dated.

There are a lot of improvements in Magento 2. I help host a podcast where we've created episodes on The end of life of Magento 1 and transitioning to Magento 2, as well as The progression of Magento 2. In that 2nd episode, we looked at not only what extra features Magento 2 launched with back in 2015 when it first debuted, but also additional features that have rolled out since. At this point, we're up to Magento 2.3.2, so there have been lots of improvements to Magento 2, whereas Magento 1 has comparatively been in a maintenance mode... Magento 1 hasn't been truly evolving for some time. If you're interested, you can listen The JetRails Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can play these episodes at https://jetrails.com/blog/announcing-the-jetrails-podcast-for-the-ecommerce-community/

On most Mondays there's a community digest where you'll find podcast episodes like these as well as articles and videos. Here's the latest digest: https://community.magento.com/t5/News-Announcements/MagentoMonday-Community-Digest-2019-07-22/m-p/13...

For a more thorough guide on the upcoming Magento 1 End of Life, I'd recommend checking out: https://www.121ecommerce.com/resources/whitepapers/magento-1-end-of-life-guide/

and here's another on Migrating to Magento 2: https://www.121ecommerce.com/resources/whitepapers/magento-2-migration-guide/

If you're looking for a quicker read on the topic, here are some articles that I've helped to author that cover the major points pretty succinctly: 

https://goshippo.com/blog/timeline-moving-magento-1-magento-2/

https://www.nchannel.com/blog/magento-1-end-of-life/

That should at least help get you started on the journey. As you have questions, be sure to post in the forums. There's a great community waiting to share their own thoughts and experiences.