What's the difference of developer and merchant version?

[airbone42]

Hi,

from the current communicated timeline we can expect a developer beta in the next weeks, followed from a developer release candidate.

After that there will be a merchant beta and a merchant release candidate.

For my understand a beta is a software product with work in progress, but a release candidate is the last moment to fix some bugs. So in that case of a developer version and a merchant version we have two betas and two release candidates. What's the difference of these both versions?

[choukalos]

Hi Tobias,

The developer versions are targeted to developers and focused on the framework changes that have been made for Magento 2. We've made significant changes to the Magento framework just a few are dependency injection, modularity, service layer, plugins, updated technology stack ( php, mysql, css3, jQuery), etc. All of these changes are focused on creating a forward looking e-commerce platform for developers.

The merchant versions will be targeted at merchants and focused on functional parity with our latest 1.x code base, updates to our enterprise code base, improved UX, etc. highlighting the improved merchant features for Magento 2.0.

-Chuck

[alankent]

To add to what Chuck has said (as others read this as well I am sure!), code is going to continue to be regularly pushed as new functionality is developed. End of this year dev beta period will start. Its just going to be another code push on GitHub, but it is a time where we are telling developers that the code base is stable enough to have a good look, try it out, let us know of problems or concerns. The earlier we get feedback, the more chance of addressing them (especially bigger issues).

Dev RC (end Q1) is a declaration of "pretty good stability". (We will reserve the right to make changes, but definitely don't want to as we know they will impact others.) We want to address platform feedback/changes by this date. We know extension developers need time to port their extensions so they can be ready at M2 GA. We are still going to be doing work ourselves, but we are trying to sequence work to have less impact on extension developers. Merchant beta and RC is working on merchant (rather than platform) level functionality as Chuck said, because we believe this will have less impact on extension developers than platform changes.

To summarize: Dev beta we recommend developers to investigate porting so they can ask for changes before it gets locked down. Dev RC is a time developers (in particular, extension developers) can start relying on the platform to be stable so they can start porting extensions. Merchant beta is to gather merchant functionality feedback. After that is GA. Right up to GA we plan to do regular code pushes. GA is when we start releasing "official" releases with Composer deployments and non-alpha/beta/rc version numbers. Production sites we recommend building from official Composer builds as they have been tested etc. It will be more controlled.

[maksek]

Hi @airbone42, does Alan's answer help you? Do you have any additional question?

[airbone42]

Yes thanks that helped a lot. Feel free to close this question