Adobe Commerce Partner Enablement Webinar for 2.4.4

30 November 2022

Services Used

Magento Support

Some insights from our Adobe Commerce Partner Enablement webinar that may be interesting to M2 Admins.

Magento agencies across the board found the upgrades time consuming to deliver and in particular, upgrades from 2.3.7 and lower to 2.4.2-2.4.3p2 specifically have been problematic due to the large jump. Understanding there is no appetite in the market for ‘Magento 3’, Adobe chose to apply significant feature improvements to the existing Magento 2 platform via its upgrade program. The webinar contained several interesting points:

1) Future updates will be less frequent, with the platform having reached a ‘critical mass’ at version 2.4.4 in terms of the innovations required to futureproof M2

2) Extended life cycle to November to 2024 for 2.4.4

3) Enhanced media gallery and asset management

4) Performance monitoring dashboard

5) Version 2.4.4 will require PHP 8.1 (echoes EOL of older PHP versions)

6) Latest version has the ability to manages more complex catalogs

7) Version 2.4.4 allows sites to run either opensearch suite or Elastic Search

8) Upgrade compatibility tool- this is a Command line tool that analyses the code required to address an upgrade to version 2.4,4 and what the issues are, and, how to approach these. However, it is only available to Commerce builds.

Our release strategy was updated to align with the EOS dates of PHP. In the long-run, this will prolong the amount of time a version is supported. For example, 2.4.4 is supported until Nov 2024. Adobe Team

Dates for your diary:

September 8th 2022 is end of life for version 2.3.7

November 28th 2022 is end of life for 2.4.0-.2.4.3

This means if your site is running version 2.3.7 after September you will need to think about paying for extended support for up to 1 year, this will allow you more time to upgrade to 2.4.4. However this only applies to Commerce builds. Opensource builds on 2.3.7 after Nov 28th, or more precisely 3 months following that date (the time allowed to install security patches) will no longer be supported and as such vendors will not be PCI compliant with their payment gateway providers.