Magento 2.2.6 Update

On September 18 the quarterly Magento 2.2.6 update was released with over 150 core fixes and enhancements. The installation of this update should be soon, because of the 25 new security enhancements, but the update itself contains no fixes for vulnerabilities. This update brings big improvements to the performance and reliability as well as enhancements of the core bundled extensions.

The highlights of this Magento update:

• 25 Security enhancements
• Performance improvements
  • Categrory product indexer is now up to 98% faster in re-indexing.
  • The catalog:image:resize command execution time is now reduced by up to 90%. But you have to delete pub/media/catalog/product/cache and run bin/magento catalog:image:resize to generate a new image cache.
  • Catalog rule re-indexing is more than 80% faster.
  • Catalog price indexer is now multithreaded and therefore faster. You can configure the number of threads.
  • Loat times for category and product pages for products with many attributes can be up to 90% faster.
  • The time required to load a store’s home page has been reduced when the top menu contains many categories.
  • Merchants can now improve store performance by disabling Magento Report functionality under: System Configuration: General > Reports > General Options.
• Reliability improvements
  • A shopping cart’s contents remain constant even when the checkout page is repeatedly reloaded.
  • Refreshing the checkout page no longer deletes the shipping address when a guest checks out.
  • The speed at which Magento places an order is no longer affected by how many shipping methods are available.
  • Configurable products are now sorted by visible prices as expected.
  • Magento no longer sends duplicate delete requests as a result of an unstable Internet connection.

Magento Cloud highlights

• Magento added a Docker Compose configuration to the Cloud ece-tools repository.
• Merchants can now change store locales without the exporting and importing configuration process.
• A new workflow lets merchant add a robots.txt file and generate a sitemap.xml file for a single domain configuration without requiring a change to the infrastructure.
• Merchants can now define multiple locales for each theme using the new SCD_MATRIX environment variable.
• Zero-downtime deployment has been implemented, which ensures no lost connections or site unavailability, providing smooth shopper experience even during deployments.
• Magento fixed an issue that caused downtime between the deploy and post-deploy phase.

Community contribution highlights

• Customers can now successfully complete an order when it contains a configurable product with an option that is deleted after the product has been placed in the shopping cart.
• Magento now maintains the default sort order for products (“newest first”) when you upgrade your Magento deployment.
• Merchants can now successfully change the applied theme setting for a store view (Content > Design > Configuration).
• Magento loads pages faster because it no longer redundantly calculates product taxes when loading category pages.

Core bundled extension highlights

• Amazon Pay
  • Implementation of the Magento payment provider gateway.
  • Improved handling of virtual products.
  • New entry in the Admin that allows Amazon Pay to be displayed in the list of payment options.
  • Combined «Synchronous», «if possible» and «Asynchronous» settings for authorization mode into one setting.
• dotmailer
  • You can now request and capture the consent of customers and guests using dotmailer’s new Consent Insight.
  • You can import only those Magento contacts who have opted in.
  • A warning alerts you when you are about to sync non-subscribers into a dotmailer account.
  • Improvements have been made to the retry process that results after a failed attempt to access EDC.
• Klarna
  • The Klarna Payments section now includes a link to Klarna automated onboarding and account sign in.
  • If an approved order is later identified as fraudulent, Klarna notifies the merchant and requests that they try to stop the order from being delivered.
  • Shipping and discount order lines have been added to order management calls.
  • Klarna now passes shipping details in capture requests.
  • The Klarna API now returns the name and logo URL to use for each payment method.
• Magento Shipping
  • Provide Click & Collect as a shipping option to customers, enabling them to directly collect shipments from designated source locations and stores.
  • Configure source locations available for Click & Collect pick-ups.
  • New Shipment Reference field associates bookings between a carrier and a customer
  • Batch Processing allows merchants to modify packages and experiences for orders assigned to a batch and book shipments for a batch.
• Magento Social
  • Magento has removed the Magento Social Facebook integration, and no longer supports the extension.

You can find all 150 fixes in Magento 2.2.6 on devdocs.magento.com.

Don not forget to create backups before installing an update.