Last month at the Magento Imagine conference in Las Vegas, new versions of the software were released: Community 1.7 and Enterprise 1.12. The Enterprise version contains 640 Fixes, 24 improvements/ changes and 15 new features. Information is a bit scarce on how the features work and where you can find/configure them, so here’s a review of all these new features that impact frontend and backend users.
Frontend
Mobile HTML5
The previous iPhone Theme was introduced back in in 2008, about time for an update! The new mobile interface features HTML5 support and supports iPhone, Android and Mobile Opera browsers.
To enable a mobile theme in Magento, you can check the post “How to redirect mobile users to your Magento Mobile Theme” from RedLightBlinking. For Magento’s default mobile theme, you use ‘iphone’ as value.
Screenshots of Magento Mobile. Homepage (top left), Product detail (right) and cart (bottom left).
Multiple Wish Lists (Enterprise only)
First you’ll need to enable this since it’s disabled by default: System > Configuration > Customers > Wishlist > General Options Here you set “Enable Multiple Wishlists” to “Yes”.
Wishlist Configuration in the Magento Backend
In the Frontend you’ll now see arrows popping up alongside products on the catagory overview pages and product detail pages where you can now choose the wishlist you want to put that particular item in.
New wishlist dropdown option
On the Wishlist page under My Account you can manage these multiple wishlists, add new ones and copy/ move products between wishlists. Wishlists can both be private or public so you can share these with people who you hope that are going to buy stuff for you.
Wishlist management for customers
Layered Navigation Pricing Enhancement
This setting can be found under System > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Layered Navigation.
Settings for the layered navigation pricing
Here you can choose if you want the product count to show or not, and you can choose if you want the calculation of the ranges to be manual or automatic. The latter option now has 2 versions: equal price ranges (which was available before) and equal product counts (a new feature in 1.7/1.12).
Add to Cart by SKU (Enterprise only)
A nice B2B functionality is the ability to quickly add product to the cart by entering or uploading a list of SKUs. In order to add the ability to Order by SKU to your frontend, you can add it as a widget to one of your content pages or refer to the new Order by SKU section in My Account. When editing a content page, you click on the Add Widget button in the WYSIWYG editor (
, second icon from the top left) and configure the widget in the popup that appears.
Configuration options of the Order by SKU widget
To enable Order by SKU on My Account in the frontend, you go to System > Configuration > Sales > Sales > Order By SKU settings (Thx Piotr Kaminski). You can enable/disable for all customers, or make this feature specific to a certain customer group.
Enable the Order by SKU function for selected customer groups
And this is how it looks in the frontend:
Order by SKU in the My Account section. It starts with 1 row, users can add more rows on the go. The widget that you can add to account pages looks the same as it does here.
oAuth integration
This is useful for when you would like to have users to log in to your shop with their Twitter or Facebook credentials and for other apps to be able to access your Magento account. After approval by the customer, Magento and the 3rd party webapplication can exchange data. This might give you the option to retrieve the sex and home location when someone connects through Facebook.
Customers can manage the applications under the new My Account > My Applications tab.
European Union VAT-ID Validation
New VAT-ID Validation configurations
To facilitate tax collection in the EU and simplify international B2B transactions we now have the option to automatically apply tax rules. Accounts are added to a specific user group based on their VAT ID and you can also place invalid VAT ID customers in a specific group. These are checked live against the official VAT Information Exchange System (VIES) from the European Commission (thx for @PeterJaap for confirming this). You also have the option to do these checks only on account creation, or with every order. For the settings you go to System > Configuration > Customers > Customer Configuration. Here you have the added functionality for the consequences you want it to have for the customer groups.
EU Cookie Restriction
It’s great to have a standard solution for this since the new cookie law will be active in many European countries in the next year and already on July 1st here in The Netherlands. Only problem is that there’s still a lot unclear about how to exactly ask for permissions and the exact details about which cookies will be seen as tracking cookies. Glad to see that Magento did a good effort to at least support a form of cookie acceptance, no matter how it pans out over the following months.
The settings can be found under System > Configuration > General > Web > Session Cookie Management. There you can change the “Cookie Restriction Mode” to Yes (default set to No). Thx for Marco de Vries for pointing me in the right direction on this feature.
Backend cookie setting
The message that will now appear in the frontend above your website:
Cookie notification
The Privacy Policy that this message links to, can be found under CMS > Pages > Manage Content. There you can see and edit a new page called “Privacy Policy”.
CAPTCHA
This feature (disabled by default) is added to battle fake login attempts for both customers and backend administrators. The CAPTCHA’s can also be used for the Create User, Forgot Password, Checkout as Guest and Register during Checkout forms. You can choose to show the CAPTCHA immediately, or only after a number of failed attempts. You can configure the number (range) of symbols, which symbols to use and if these should be case sensitive or not. To enable and configure this for customers, go to System > Configuration > Customers > Customer Configuration > CAPTCHA. For Administrators you go to System > Configuration > Advanced > Admin > CAPTCHA.
CAPTCHA configuration options
And this is how it looks in the frontend:
The new CAPTCHA field. It also does a great Yoav ;)
My advice would be to keep this disabled by default, and only start using it when you encounter fake accounts that are probably made by bots.
Backend
Visitor Segmentation (Enterprise only)
Customers > Customer Segments
When you add or edit a customer segment in 1.12 you can now also segment for people that are not logged in to your site so you can target these groups with specific actions. +1 for the psychologists and other behavioral scientists amongst us ;).
New visitor segmentation options
You can segment visitors based on the following variables:
Shopping cart
- Shopping Cart total
- Number of Cart line items
- Products Quantity
Products
- Product List
- Product History
Expanded Rule-based Product Relations (Enterprise only)
Catalog > Rule Based Product relations
This now has the added functionality to target a specific customer (or visitor) segment. This means you can create different related products based on – for instance – the current items that a specific user has in his shopping cart.
Added Customer Segments option
Auto-generation of Coupon Codes
This feature lets you automatically create specific coupon codes based on your settings. You can find the default configuration settings under System > Configuration > Customers > Promotions > Auto Generated Specific Coupon Codes.
Configuration settings for the Auto Generated Specific Coupon Codes
When you add a new Shopping Cart price rule, select the “Specific coupon” option and check the “Use Auto Generation” box:
Here you select the Specific Coupon option and select "Use Auto Generation"
When you do this and save the rule, you’ll see a new menu item appear called “Manage Coupon Codes”:
Automatic Coupon Generation settings
Here you can change the default setting if needed and generate the codes. After creation, you can export these to CSV of Excel for further processing. A much requested feature at the clients I’ve worked with, and a nice addition for the next Magento release might be to also support importing a list of codes.
Customer Group Pricing
Another much requested B2B feature is the ability to have separate pricing for different customers. You can now apply different prices and tier pricing based on customer groups.
Catalog > Manage Products > [Select Product] > Prices tab
New Customer Group Pricing functionality
CMS Page Hierarchy Enhancements (Enterprise only)
When you add a new item (‘Node’) to the CMS hierarchy, you now have the option to directly add it to the website menu:
New Page Navigation Menu Options
Besides that, you can now also copy hierarchies between the stores you have in your Magento installation:
Copy menu items between stores
Backup and Rollback
The only backup action you could do before 1.7/1.12 was to hit the backup button and then wait until the database backup was finished. Options have increased :)
To see the options go to System > Tools > Backup.
The backup option is now split into 3 options:
- System Backup
- Database and Media Backup
- Database Backup
All versions will give you the option to name your backup before starting it and you’ll have a checkbox to put the website into maintenance mode while the backup is running. The System Backup version also has the option to exclude Media folders if you like.
The Magento announcement talks about “Manage and schedule…” but I don’t see any options to schedule automatic backups, I only see the option to do a manual backup. If you have found it, let me know in the comments :). As Peter Jaap pointed out t me in the comments, the schedule function can be found under System > Configuration > Advanced > System > Scheduled Backup Settings:
Scheduled Backup options
When the backup is done, you can not only download or delete it but you can now also perform a Rollback right from the backend.
You can backup and restore Magento in the backend.
Like Magento says in their announcement: This feature is particularly useful when testing new modules or customizations, or when upgrading to a new version of Magento. We do not recommend using this feature in your production environment. So it’s mainly useful for your development/beta sites to be ably to backup, test and quickly restore without the need to leave Magento. It’s not meant as a way to safely backup your live environments.
Other
REST APIs Support
The new Magento REST API uses three-legged OAuth 1.0a protocol to allow applications to safely access Magento services. What this means for you? You can manage customers, customer addresses, sales orders, inventories and products using HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE). Data requests and responses can be in XML or JSON format.
This initial version of the REST API supports the following functions:
- Create/Retrieve/Update/Delete a simple product
- Retrieve a list of orders and specific order information
- Update/Retrieve catalog inventory
- Create/Retrieve/Update/Delete complete customer information
Yeah I just copied that from Magento’s announcement. I’m not a developer so I’m not even going to try to get into this one :). If you want to know more, check these resources:
Payment Bridge 1.1 Updates (Enterprise only)
If you want to use Magento’s Payment Bridge, this will be a useful update for you. Besides the 3 options previously supported (PayPal, Authorize.net and Payflow Pro) Magento added 13 other gateways:
- Psi Gate
- RBS Worldpay
- Database and Media Backup
- Braintree
- First Data
- Card Gate Plus
- DIBS
- eWay Direct
- Ogone Directlink
- Paybox
- Payone
- Sage Pay
- CCAvenue
You’ll find the options under System > Configuration > Sales > Payment Methods.
Magento Payment Bridge options
Conclusion
That was about it for the new Magento features in 1.7/1.12. I think it’s quite a nice update, especially when you’re looking into using Magento for B2B projects. So what do you think about this update? Will it improve your/ your clients business? What feature are you most looking forward to using in your shop?
This is a translation of the Dutch blog I wrote at http://ecommerceblog.ism.nl.
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In addition to my Magento Community 1.7 and Enterprise 1.12 New Features Walkthrough: Magento also published a new User Guide for the Community 1.7 edition. You can now download it, free of charge from magento.com.
I'm passionate about helping your business to improve its online user experience and persuasiveness. I can help you by advising and helping you with usability, testing, persuasion, behavioral targeting & my knowledge of Magento. 
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