Magento Releases 1.8 Community Edition With Performance, Security & Tax Calculation Improvements

I’ve been following Magento since the early alphas. Today, Magento released Community Edition 1.8 with improvements to security, tax calculations and overall functionality.

Below is a breakdown of the key improvements in this release.

Enhanced Tax Calculations

Magento Community Edition 1.8 improves tax calculation accuracy for VAT merchants and eliminates potential rounding errors that can be confusing to buyers. Knowledge Base updates also provide more guidance on tax configurations and Canadian tax requirements, enabling you to more fully benefit from the native Magento tax engine.

Functional Improvements

We made approximately 350 functional improvements that boost product quality in key areas, including the web store, shopping cart, admin order creation, import and export functionality, web API components, and payment methods.

Performance Improvements

Magento Community Edition 1.8 enables a better shopping experience through faster page-loading in the checkout process and optimized cache adapters for single server systems, which minimize the number of cached pages that must be refreshed when product updates are made. The performance of the 1.8 administrator panel is also improved for those of you with large product or order databases.

Security Enhancements

Through a number of enhancements, we also strengthened the security of Magento Community Edition. A full list of enhancements is available in our release notes.

Updates to the Alpha Release

A few new updates were made to the alpha version of Magento Community Edition 1.8. We removed the requirement to have globally unique category and product URL keys, giving you greater flexibility in your URL structures. We also incorporated the recent USPS API patch, DHL code updates, and the latest Redis backend cache code, now called Cm_Cache_Backend_Redis. We have also included Cm_RedisSession, a Redis session storage module.

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