What’s news in Magento 1.9.x Release?

Magento is always welcome as all of other versions what is expected to fix the performance but not now again. Maybe we need to wait until magento 2.0. For now, even though it doesn’t show up the performance changes but all of others changes are good enough to upgrade to this new version what help us a lot to get peace in mind on our business. Let ‘s go through the changes and the improvements of magento 1.9.

Highlights

This section lists the key new features in Magento CE 1.9. For more information about these new features, see New Features in Magento EE 1.14 and CE 1.9.

The default theme in Magento CE 1.9 uses Responsive Web Design principles to provide a better experience for users of mobile devices in particular. Benefits include:

• You can get a tablet and smart phone friendly responsive site in about half the time as before, speeding time to market and freeing up resources for other projects.
• Your responsive site makes you better able to participate in the fast growing mobile commerce space, gives you the ability to more easily adapt to new opportunities, and is less expensive to maintain. A responsive site also offers potential search engine optimization (SEO) benefits because it uses

Google’s preferred approach to mobile-optimizing sites.

Cross-border trade: (Also referred to as pricing consistency.) We support European Union (EU) merchants operating across regions and geographies who want to show their customers a single price. Pricing is clean and uncluttered regardless of tax structures and rates that vary from country to country.

To enable cross-border trade in the Admin Panel, click System > Configuration > SALES > Tax > Calculation Settings, option Enable Cross Border Trade.

Supports PHP 5.4. For more information, see the PHP changelog.

The Zend Framework has been upgraded to version 1.12.3

Checkout improvements:

• You can capture up to 18% more sales by providing customers access to financing using the Bill Me Later service at no additional cost to you.
• You can offer your customers a smoother, more streamlined PayPal Express Checkout experience, which tries alternative payment options when a customer’s credit card is rejected
• Improve the PayPal Express checkout experience by eliminating the following steps in the checkout process:
• The order review page can be enabled or disabled
• Eliminate the necessity of clicking Update Order before Place Order(Conversion means helping customers stay interested and complete their purchases.)

Security Enhancements

• Addressed a potential cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability while creating configurable product variants.
• Addressed a potential security issue that could result in displaying information about a different order to a customer.
• Users can no longer change the currency if the payment method PayPal Website Payments Standard is used.
• Removed an .swf file from the Magento distribution because of security issues.
• Improved file system security.
• Enhanced the security of action URLs, such as billing agreements.
• Addressed a potential session fixation vulnerability during checkout.
• Improved the security of the Magento randomness function.

Magento 1.9.1 Changes

A default setting for configurable and bundled products has changed. When you create a configurable or bundled product in the Admin Panel, click Manage > Products. Create a new configurable or bundled product and click the Design tab. The default option for Display Product Options In has changed to Product Info Column.

The Google Websites Optimizer has been disabled because it has been deprecated by Google. (In earlier EE versions, this option was available in the

Admin Panel at System > Configuration > SALES > Google API > Google Website Optimizer).

Two new options to prevent “clickjacking” if you run Magento in a frame or iframe:

• Enable frames only in the same domain.
  Enable frames.
  Important: For security reasons, Magento strongly recommends against running the Magento software in a frame.
• The options are available in the Admin Panel at System > Configuration > ADVANCED > Admin > Security and are named Allow Magento Backend to run in frame and Allow Magento Frontend to run in frame.
• Enabling the option causes the X-Frame-Options request header to be sent.

FedEx changed their endpoints for sandbox and production to the following:

• Production: https://ws.fedex.com/web-services
• Sandbox: https://wsbeta.fedex.com/web-services

Because of these changes, Magento cannot retrieve shipping rate information or print shipping labels for FedEx unless this fix is applied.

CE 1.9 includes a fix that prevented some Discover credit cards from validating properly. The issue was that certain Discover credit card number ranges were not recognized as being valid. As a result of the fix, all Discover cards should validate properly.

Important: This is not a security threat. No data has been compromised or misused. It affects only the ability to validate certain credit card number ranges as valid Discover card numbers.

The default values for two configuration options changed. Both options can be found in the Admin Panel under System > Configuration > CATALOG > Catalog > Frontend. The new default values follow:

• Products per Page on Grid Allowed Values is now 12, 24, 36.
• Products per Page on Grid Default Value is now 12.

On the New Rule page for shopping cart price rules (Rule Information tab page), explanatory text Usage limit enforced for logged in customers only was added to the Uses per customer field. This is to avoid confusion encountered by some Magento merchants.

Changes to PayPal Express checkout:

Changes to both Proceed to Checkout and to Pay With PayPal:

Customers cannot edit their billing address on the PayPal site—in fact, the billing address does not display on the PayPal site.

Magento CE uses the customer’s PayPal address information, not the address information stored in Magento CE. The customer does not need to enter

Magento CE or EE address information.

When the customer is redirected to the PayPal site, they can click Change next to their payment method to change it.

The Magento administrator can set billing address information in the Admin Panel as follows: System > Configuration > SALES > Payment Methods.

For any payment method that includes Express Checkout, in Basic Settings, set the value of the Require Customer’s Billing Address list.