…sort of
This week the 2.0 versions of Magento Community and Enterprise became officially available to the public. While Magento 2.0 has been a crowd-sourced endeavor, with developers around the world involved along the way, and has been tested rigorously including for some real websites, it is still in many ways brand new. Magento 1.x store owners, and those interested in building a new Magento store will be left wondering what their best bet is for now.
So far, all indications are that Magento 2.0 has been worth the long wait, and offers several enhancements and benefits. On the other hand, it’s still a much younger sibling to Magento 1.0. As of this morning, the Magento-Connect extension catalog only has 57 available plugins for this newest version of Magento. In comparison, while there isn’t a published tally available, there are thousands of Magento 1.x extensions currently available. Major extensions developers like Amasty, MageStore, WebShopApps, Mirasvit, Aheadworks, MageWorx and GoMage accounts for many hundreds on their own. Much of the value of Magento has historically been the ability of the website owner to leverage Magento Extensions to quickly and cost effectively grow the features and functionality of a Magento website. Until more extensions are made compatible with Magento 2.0, it will be hard to provide a site with various custom functionality cost effectively.
Additionally, while being an early adopter to new software can have it’s benefits, it’s likely to still have some kinks to be worked out. Even after Alpha and Beta testing, we expect different users with different business needs and use cases to experience different bugs. We’ll be watching intently for additional updates, such as a version “2.0.1” as these issues are addressed.
With the holiday shopping season fast approaching, and with the factors mentioned in this post in mind, we’ll be continuing to recommend Magento 1.x in the coming weeks in almost all situations. It may not sound as exciting as hopping onto the 2.0 bandwagon, but we have a strong commitment to focusing on the best interests and bottom-lines of our clients, and 1.x will continue to be the best option for most of the for a while longer. We will however continue to watch 2.0, and are very much looking forward to deploying 2.0 sites for clients very soon.
– Robert Rand
