Update to PHP 7.4 with the New Adobe Commerce releases!

Welcome to the next phase in the evolution of Adobe Commerce, powered by Magento (formerly known as Magento Commerce and Adobe Commerce Cloud). In the almost three years since Adobe acquired Magento, we have integrated our sales, marketing, and product teams within the Adobe Experience Cloud business unit and aligned our partner and developer experience efforts…thus uniting our two brands under one commerce umbrella.

Additionally, at this year’s Adobe Summit, we announced new capabilities for Adobe Commerce. To learn more about all the commerce innovations coming out of Adobe Summit and how they’re enabling merchants to be more agile, open new channels, and enable new buyer journeys across industries, watch the replay of “The New Commerce Imperative” Summit session.

Adobe Commerce 2.4.2-p1 and 2.3.7 are Now Available

Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source 2.4.2-p1 and 2.3.7 are now generally available. In a normal release cycle, we would also have a feature release in the 2.4 line, but these releases focus on security updates and upgrading to PHP 7.4.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital commerce has evolved into the primary driver for business growth. In 2020, consumers flocked to online commerce with $861.12 billion in sales, a 44% increase over 2019. This increased reliance on digital commerce makes it more important than ever to remain secure and current with your digital solutions.

With this in mind, both Adobe Commerce 2.4.2-p1 and 2.3.7 bring important security updates to customers, while 2.3.7 also adds support for PHP 7.4 and in-product guidance (previously available in Adobe Commerce 2.4.2) to help merchants take advantage of this growth with confidence.

Important EOS Timelines

As a reminder, PHP 7.3 reaches end of support in December, 2021, and Adobe Commerce 2.3.x reaches end of support in April, 2022. To help bridge this period, the new 2.3.7 release includes support for PHP 7.4 so that merchants have full support of the 2.3 line until its EOS date in early 2022.

Our strong recommendation is that Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source 2.3.x users upgrade directly to the 2.4 line and PHP 7.4 to help maintain PCI compliance and to create the most cost-effective upgrade approach. Support for PHP 7.4 in the 2.3.7 version is intended only to help customers maintain PCI compliance until they can upgrade to version 2.4. Keep this guidance in mind as you discuss your upgrade strategy with your team.

For more information about PHP and Adobe Commerce 2.3 end of support, see our DevBlog post.

Additional Product Announcements

In addition to the Q2 Adobe Commerce updates, we’re excited to share these additional product updates:

• PWA Studio (Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source 2.4.2+ only)
  PWA Studio 10 is now live with new features designed to reduce time spent on custom code. Merchants can now expand payment options to include check and money orders, create an optimal desktop experience with mega menu support, and easily shop multiple stores using our store switcher drop-down menu available now as a Venia component. For more information, see the PWA 10 release notes and experience the storefront updates for yourself on the Venia PWA Demo site.
• Egress Filtering (Adobe Commerce only)
  We have added Egress Filtering for our existing Adobe Commerce Starter merchants. This feature is a security mechanism to allow or deny network traffic from the store to other destinations. The primary goal is to stop any malware from sending private information to outside entities. For more information, see more in our Firewall documentation.
• Product Recommendations (Adobe Commerce 2.3.7+ only)
  Coming next quarter, expanded product recommendations support for more complex B2B buying scenarios will allow merchants to achieve higher conversion rates and increased average order value (AOV) when selling to both B2C and B2B customers. Merchants will be able to configure product recommendations so that B2B buyers see only recommendations that reflect the products and pricing in their assigned catalog.
• This adds to other recent improvements that allow merchants to preview their Product Recommendations while configuring them in the Adobe Commerce Admin and to deploy Product Recommendations to pages in a PWA Studio-based storefront. See more in our Release Notes for Product Recommendations.
• Security Scan tool
  In late May, we will also be adding PWA Studio support to the Security Scan tool. For more information about Magento Scan Tool and its functionalities, see more in our User Documentation.
• Customer Support Data Privacy
  Customer Engineering is revising the process by which we collect consent to access Customer Data for support requests. Under this new process, only the Primary User within a Magento Customer profile can provide consent. The data access consent will be centralized into account.magento.com in a new section called “Privacy Settings”. We understand that the Primary User may not always be the user submitting support tickets: to accommodate this, we have developed the ability to allow you to grant Customer Engineering access to Customer Data for an extended period of time (1 week / 1 month / 1 year / Unlimited). Consent should be granted prior to ticket creation to avoid delay in support services delivery. This consent to Customer Data may be withdrawn by the Primary User at any time. See more in Adobe support customer data access and privacy.

Look for more important updates and features coming in August with Adobe Commerce 2.4.3.