Top-10 improvements in Magento 2.3

PWA is a hot trend in e-commerce as this technology allows a user to interact with a website in a more convenient way. In 2.3 release, Magento offers a built-in environment for PWA creation, called PWA Studio. This suite of tools allows to develop, deploy and support a PWA storefront in Magento 2.

Here is a list of main features of Magento’s PWA Studio:

• Various tools for content personalization and the addition of local preferences;
• One code base that allows managing all channels and experiences;
• Built-in developer tools that enable fast prototyping, effective debugging,  and increased productivity.

With Magento 2.3 developers are now able to define database structures and changes in XML files instead of relying on install scripts. All thanks to the new approach -- declarative database schema. With this, Magento can convert the XML schema files in SQL and further perform them.

What that means that Magento 2.3 developers now have the ability to perform a rollback of database changes. And in addition to that, new approach simplifies installation and upgrade of Magento.

GraphQL is a data query language created by Facebook to provide better performance even with a slow network connection. 

This language delivers data retrieval possibilities for PWAs by allowing to request exactly the data that you need and giving the ability to join data in a single request. 

In other words, it allows to get smaller amounts of data and make fewer API requests. This is an improvement over a SOAP / REST request which returns all data associated with an endpoint and requires at least one request per resource.

With this feature, Magento can process a large number of API requests asynchronously without waiting for the response from the server. This eliminates an issue with long response processing times which is especially important for large webstores with thousands of products in the catalog.

Magento 2.3 recieved full support of a latest PHP version -- 7.2. This allows the platform to remain on top of the technological process and gives significant benefits in terms of performance, stability, and security. 

The update has brought some big news for Magento Open Source users -- an Elasticsearch now available for this Magento's version too. This powerful search engine capable to perform complex search queries and supports filtering by attributes, known also as faceted search.

Another solution that will ease merchants daily work is an addition of Multi Source Inventory (MSI). This feature allows performing multiple stock management in different locations without any third-party modules. 

In addition to that, MSI delivers a reservation system, which directly improves checkout performance. Now Magento can reserve some quantity of products in stock instead of decrementing inventory when the order is placed. This mechanism eliminates re-indexing and performance issues during peak order times.

With Magento 2.3 merchants finally got a long waited ability to create customized pages without any changes in code. This new tool is a visual editor that allows to customize pages using drag and drop and other user-friendly practices. 

Page Builder to be included into Magento Commerce and will be available to purchase for all Magento Open Source owners.

Magento 2.3 includes the new version of it's WYSIWYG editor, TinyMCE. An update brings numerous customization improvements: widgets, media gallery, and variables can be implemented as plugins and can be defined either globally or per instance.

This useful feature will let you control which user roles are permitted to view and delete Magento's cache. This will be useful if you have a new team of merchants onboard that has not so much experience with Magento's cache management. Now each member of the team can get a different level of access to the Magento's cache.