Magento Commerce 2.1 Release Candidate 3 (RC3) Release Notes

We are pleased to present Magento 2.1 Release Candidate 3 (RC3). This release candidate build is not intended for production purposes. Instead, it provides the development community opportunities to:

• preview the new features and fixes that Magento 2.1 GA will contain

• contribute to the Magento 2.1 code base by identifying unresolved issues

• test your 2.0 extensions against 2.1

We welcome your participation in this process! Enterprise Edition customers can provide feedback in these two ways:

• Commerce GitHub repository. For more information on how to provide feedback and contribute on GitHub, see Code contributions.

• Email to DL-Magento-2.1-Feedback@magento.com.

This Release Candidate is available from repo.magento.com if you have a Commerce license or GitHub if you have previously signed an agreement to access Magento Commerce 2.0 beta software on GitHub.

Backward-incompatible changes are documented in Magento 2.1 Backward Incompatible Changes.

Highlights

Magento Enterprise Edition 2.1 includes several new and exciting features:

• Content Staging and Preview improves productivity by enabling business teams to easily create, preview, and schedule a wide range of content updates without involving IT. Merchants can make updates to products, categories, CMS content, promotions, and pricing and can preview these changes based on specific dates and times or store views. User-friendly dashboards provide greater visibility into all planned site changes and updates can be automatically deployed at scheduled times.

• Elasticsearch is a next-generation search technology that is replacing Solr in Magento Commerce 2.1. It is simpler to set up, able to handle large catalogs, and can easily scale as search volume grows. It supports 33 languages out-of-the-box and merchants can configure stop words and synonyms to ensure high quality search results.

• PayPal enhancements include PayPal in-context checkout and saved credit cards. In-context checkout helps to increase conversion rates 69 bps by allowing shoppers to pay with PayPal without leaving the merchant’s site. PayPal saved credit cards boost repeat purchases by allowing merchants to securely store credit card information with PayPal so customers do not need to re-enter it in checkout or when reordering items from the Admin interface.

• Braintree enhancements enable merchants to qualify for the simplest set of PCI compliance requirements by using Braintree Hosted Fields to collect all sensitive cardholder information in checkout. Merchants retain complete control over their checkout style and layout because Braintree uses small, transparent iframes to replace individual payment fields. Merchants can now also access Braintree settlement reports from within the Magento Admin interface.

• Improved management interfaces make it faster and easier to search for information in the Admin, set up global search synonyms, and create new product, category, and CMS content.

Fixed issues

Security enhancement

• Magento no longer discloses sensitive information about the server when an invalid URL has been requested.

Performance enhancements

• Category page performance has significantly improved when categories contain more than 30000 items.

• Setting the Merge CSS Files option to Yes no longer reduces product performance. (GITHUB-4710)

Staging

Changing the update start or end time on one entity no longer overwrites update settings on other stores. Previously, changing the update start or end time on one page would overwrite settings on other stores.

• The product update preview now works as expected.

• You can now filter products by Category ID as expected.

Google Tag Manager

• The Update Cart Quantity event now correctly observes add or remove cart actions.

Import/Export

• Magento now successfully imports products with a “gift_message_available” parameter. Previously, Magento exported the wrong “gift_message_available” parameter, which resulted in a validation error. (54200)

Cache

• Category menus now display as expected for installations using Varnish. (GITHUB-4540)

• Varnish cache is no longer disabled due to HTML requests.

• Magento now enables caches by default when upgrading by the command-line interface. (GITHUB-4707)

• Magento no longer disables all cache types after you use the command-line interface to enable or disable modules. Previously, all cache types were disabled after you disabled or enabled modules through the command line interface.

Messages and documentation

• Media Uploader error messages now make it clear the SVG file format is not supported. (GITHUB-2958)

• The Swagger-generated docs for the REST API now display the property identifiers formatted as camelCaseFormat. (GITHUB-4925)

• Magento now displays enhanced messages for cache management exceptions.

Payment methods

• Magento no longer displays the Payflow Pro option for the Vault Provider field for countries where that option is unavailable.

• Problems placing an order using the Payflow Pro payment method have been resolved.

• You can now place an order using the Braintree Credit card as the payment method when 3D Secure Verification is enabled.

Miscellaneous

• You can now re-install Magento and use a different Admin email address than you had previously used.

• Using the Web Setup wizard to disable a module no longer results in a backup error. (GITHUB-3562)

• Magento no longer disables all cache types after you use the command-line interface to enable or disable modules. Previously, all cache types were disabled after you disabled or enabled modules through the command line interface.

• The ProductsList widget now returns the identities of the products displayed by this widget.

• Magento now retains special prices as expected for grouped products.

• You can now use a custom template to successfully create New Account email for a new customer.

• Magento now displays the thousand separator for a product’s price price, weight, and custom option price fields.

• You can now remove products from the shopping cart as expected. Previously, if the number of products being removed exceeded half the quantity of products in stock, Magento would throw an error.

• You can now successfully save new order status. Previously, you could not save new order status when selecting Create New Status from the Go to Stores > Order Status menu. (GITHUB-4146)

• JavaScript validation now works as expected when you add a product to a shopping cart. Previously, if a validation error occurred during this task, Magento would still submit the form.

• Grid view pagination (as configured from Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog >Storefront) now works as expected. (GITHUB-3861)

• Magento now correctly displays prices for products with several configurable price options.

• You can successfully complete an order for a quantity of product that exceeds half of the product stock.

• You can now generate a new simple product without changing the names of already existing products. (GITHUB-4951)

• The Stock Status attribute now works as expected during creation of configurable products.

• You can successfully delete an Admin user without breaking integration if the Admin user shares the same ID as an integration user. Previously, if you deleted an Admin user who shared an ID with an integration user, the integration would be permanently broken.

• Problems related to login when inline translation is enabled have been resolved. (GITHUB-4925)

• Magento now generates URL rewrites for a new store view as expected during a mass update to a new website.

• Magento no longer prompts you to select a dropdown attribute when adding a product to the shopping cart if you have already selected an attribute. (GITHUB-4899)

• You can now drag values as expected when working in the Customizable Options window.

• Tax Report now displays records as expected.

Known issues

Magento Commerce 2.1, Release Candidate 3 includes the following known issues:

• The process of uninstalling modules using command-line tools unexpectedly stalls. Workaround: Ensure that your <magento root>/var/composer_home/auth.json file contains your authentication keys. You can create an auth.json file in one of two ways:

Method 1: If you ran Composer commands from CLI before and specified your repo.magento.com credentials, you can copy the existing auth.json file from your home directory under "~/.composer/"

Method 2: You can manually create the file using this format:

{
    "http-basic": {
        "repo.magento.com": {
            "username": "<public key>",
            "password": "<private key>"
        }
    }
}

• The Category page displays the former price instead of the current price during scheduled updates.

Technology stack

Our technology stack is built on PHP and MySQL. Magento 2.1 RC3 supports:

• PHP 5.6
• PHP 7.0.2
• PHP 7.0.6 + up until 7.1
• MySQL 5.6.

We do not support PHP 5.5.x or 7.0.5.

Installation and upgrade instructions

You can install Magento Commerce 2.1 Release Candidate 3 (RC3) using Composer.

This Release Candidate is for test purposes only. Do not install it in a production environment.

composer create-project --repository-url=https://repo.magento.com/ magento/project-enterprise-edition=<version> <installation directory name>

composer create-project --repository-url=https://repo.magento.com/ magento/project-enterprise-edition=2.1.1 magento2