What to expect from Magento Community Edition v1.7

The next major update for Magento Community Edition is on the horizon, but what can we expect from it? Quite a lot actually, I’ll run through the highlights of the release in this post, but of course it contains many bug fixes and other small features as well. Here at iWeb we are Magento eCommerce Specialists, so we can help you upgrade your existing Magento version or migrate your existing store to Magento very easily, get in touch today.

New Layered Navigation price bucket algorithm

We anticipate that this will give you more control over the price brackets that appear for the filterable navigation on the category view pages.

Added captcha functionality

To help prevent submission of spam reviews and spam contact enquires, Magento will include an optional captcha field on these forms, where you would enter a code displayed in an image to verify that you are indeed a human.

Implemented different base prices for customer groups

A very useful feature, allowing you to set a base price for each customer group (e.g. retail or wholesaler) on a per product basis.

Auto generation of multiple coupon codes for a price rule

You can currently only generate one coupon code per promotional rule in the admin system, this feature will allow the generation of multiple coupon codes that will apply the same promotional rule to your shopping basket.

System backup and rollback functionality

A very useful new feature of Magento v1.7 is the backup and rollback feature, which effectively allows you to reverse changes if things for whatever reason go wrong.

VAT ID Validation

If you cater for lots of business customers, it can be advantageous to exclude VAT from their order, but this will require getting their VAT number, which should be properly validated to stop VAT fraud.

Support for DHL Europe

Good news for customers who would like to use Magento with DHL as their preferred shipping option, as Magento V1.7 brings us UK and European support.

Redesigned Mobile theme

For mobile devices, such as the Apple iPhone, shopping on a mobile store is much more likely to bring conversions rather than running the full blown website on a mobile device. Adding a mobile theme to your eCommerce store will definitely help your conversions for your mobile visitors.