Upgrade to Magento Community 1.8

Here is an overview of the most important Magento Community 1.8 fixes and improvements sorted by importance.

Magento Community 1.8 is the next major and most important Magento CE platform update. It is highly recommended to upgrade your store to Magento Community 1.8 as soon as stable version will be released due to important security fixes and performance improvements.

Note: Stable Magento Community 1.8 will be released very soon. Currently Magento CE is Alpha version which is not recommended for production stores yet.

Why upgrade to Magento Community 1.8?

Top Magento CE 1.8 security improvements:

  • [Important] A remote code execution vulnerability was fixed.
  • [Important] Session fixation vulnerability during the registration process was fixed.
  • [Important] Security issues with Google Checkout payments have been resolved.
  • [Important] Security issues with Authorize.net payments have been resolved.
  • Additional Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection.
  • Magento no longer allow web browsers to store user names or passwords.
  • The cryptographic methods used to store passwords were improved.

Top Magento CE 1.8 performance improvements:

  • [Important] Elimination of many types of database deadlocks.
  • [Important] Optimized cache adapters for single-server systems.
  • [Important] Checkout performance improvements.
  • Tax system performance improvements.

Other important fixes and improvements:

Shipping:

  • Fixed issues with United Parcel Service (UPS) shipping rates.
  • United States Post Office (USPS) APIs improvements.
  • FedEx shipping method improvements.

Taxes:

  • Rounding Error Fixes.
  • Fixed Product Tax (FPT) Fixes.
  • Discount Calculation Fixes.

Other notable improvements:

  • CE 1.8 is now World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) compliant.
  • Magento conforms to the latest version of the PayPal Instant Payment Notification (IPN) guidelines.

You can check the full list if all improvements in the Magento Community 1.8 release notes.

How to upgrade to Magento 1.8?

There are two ways on how to upgrade your live store to the latest Magento version: