Magento 2 coming soon!! Will your existing Magento 1 website be able to upgrade to Magento 2?

Magento 2.0 – is not just a product upgrade rather a comprehensive revamp and rewrite of the Magento code base. There are significant changes in the framework to improve stability, performance, making it easier to customize, ensuring faster time to market and lower development costs.
It has been a tough ride for Magento 2. Things have not worked out according to plans. It was announced way back in 2010 with plans of 2011 launch. Many members of the Magento community are unhappy with the way things have shaped up so far and have been vocal in expressing their frustration. But now it seems that the wait is over with Merchant General Availability release for Q4 2015.
Magento 2: Roadmap to Merchant General Availability

Developer Beta Stage: This stage will allow Magento developers to get familiar with the new Magento ecosystem. It involves upgrading tech stack and obtaining valuable feedback from the ecosystem regarding the implementation.

Developer Release Stage: The goal is to collect feedback and make changes. This stage will address quality issues and bug fixing to ensure stability of general architecture and code.

Merchant Beta: Just like the developer beta stage, there will be a beta period for the Merchant functionality. This will be a critical stage as any change might impact extensions.

Merchant General Availability: Based on Merchant Beta, feedback, and changes, Magento 2 will be fully released in Q4 2015.

Magento 2: A Feature-rich system

Magento 2 is the much hyped and talked about follow up product to Magento 1 released back in 2007 with focus on the Web world. On the other hand, the code base of Magento 2 has been updated to use current technologies. Codebase is very modular, allowing seamless integration.

Modern Technology Stack

• JQuery: Developers can use jQuery library as its default JavaScript library.
• HTML5: Get great shopping experience on any device with access to APIs and exciting new features in HTML5.
• CSS3: Improves page load speed, Magento 2 supports visual effects like multiple backgrounds, reflections, shadows.
• RequireJS: Improves page load times, as well as modular design of frontend components.
• PHP 5.5: Improves the overall performance and efficiency.
• MySQL 5.6: Allows merchants to set up database that ensures scalability.
• PSR Compliance: Makes Magento 2 easy to learn and standardizes the use of PHP to allow different code libraries to work together.

Easy integration & customization compared to previous versions of Magento   

• The modular code of Magento 2 allows easy integration and reduces the dependencies that exist among modules.
• Users will have a clean interface with high-level of flexibility and customization.
• Layered navigation and modular search makes search functions easy to customize. You can easily enable, as well as disable search or delete it from code.
• Integration with external systems is robust due to enhanced APIs.
• Themes are easier to customize.

Speed & scalability to grow your ecommerce business   

• Full page cache will be available out of the box, as well as support Varnish and Redis.
• Refactored indexers will work in the background.
• New indexers will deliver relatively faster query performance compared to previous enterprise version and efficient updates.
• More admin users will be able to create and update products while minimizing conflicts related to the data thanks to core improvement in the admin site.

High-performance testing

The all-new and improved Magento Testing Framework will allow developers to automate functional testing of the developed functionality. This will enable frequent releases and high-end product quality.

Why upgrade to Magento 2?

By getting on Magento 1 you are on right path forward and migration to Magento 2 will be relatively simpler for you. The Magento team will provide store owners with tools to simplify the process of transition.

However, you need to take into account the fact that Magento 2.0 might not offer complete backward compatibility. Magento 2 will be a complete revamp in terms of architecture and coding. Migration from previous version will be next to impossible.

Due to this extensions for Magento 2 will be treated as completely new extensions and will need to be developed from right from the scratch level.

Is it end of the road for Magento 1?

Magento 1 has improved over the past years to the point of being the most extensible eCommerce platform today. It will certainly not disappear overnight and continue to run for a couple of years.

The Magento team is planning to support Magento 1 for nearly 3 years after the launch of Magento 2.  However, since there is no official word about the future of Magento 1, views are highly subjective.

In all probability, developers will support Magento 1 for some time. However, once Magento 2 is released it is likely that agencies will not offer new development services on Magento 1.

It is likely that services will be geared more towards Magento maintenance. So most ecommerce store owners will not be left stranded. But in all probability, the support will decrease gradually.

Considering the fact that all good Magento extension developers will be moving to Magento 2.0, a switch to new version will be inevitable.