This morning Varien released the much-anticipated 1.2 version of Magento. It includes several new features, including downloadable products and better search capabilities. But the real focus of this release appears to have been performance and, of course, bug fixes. Severe performance constraints in managing products and customers at the back-end appear to have been addressed; headway has been made towards enhancing Magento’s ability to scale though the use of Memcached; and caching has been implemented in other areas of the application.
The usual cautions I’d make about upgrading certainly apply here. If you’re going to install this, be sure to first test it on a development server. Before doing so, you may also want to have a look at the Magento forums where the usual early reports of issues – and praise – can be found.
