I’m sure you have heard of the new release of Magento 2. Version 2.1.0 is now available and it includes some improvements and corrections in the functional part of the system.

Magento Community Edition 2.1.0 contains the following new features:

PayPal improvement. In this version there is PayPal in-context checkout. This functionality can help merchants increase their sales because buyers can pay directly in the merchant’s online store. Also the saved credit cards functionality has been added in this version as a means to increase repeat sales by allowing merchants to store credit card data. So, during return visits clients don’t need to type credit cards’ data once again, which makes the purchase procedure more comfortable.

Braintree Hosted Fields. They are small, transparent iframes that replace the sensitive credit card inputs during the checkout. They allow visitors of an online store to stay on the checkout page, with fields hosted by Braintree that submit credit card data directly to Braintree, without passing through the hosting account. They help merchants to meet the latest PCI data security requirements while guaranteeing that their customization doesn’t change. Braintree reports are ready for use in Magento Admin.

There are also enhancements in the search functionality of Magento Admin, in the setup of global search synonyms, and in the creation of a new category, product and CMS content. Read more information here.

How to update Magento 2
In order to make our overview more complete, we’d like to remind you how to update your Magento 2 to the latest version. There are 2 ways to do this:

update using “Web Setup Wizard” in Magento
update through command line or terminal
Web Setup Wizard
Pay attention that before you start using the Web Setup Wizard you need to apply the patch MDVA-532 which fixes a problem with Magento composer-installer component.

Login to your admin panel and then go to System > Web Setup Wizard > System upgrade.

There are clear steps that you should perform:

  • Version select. Here you should select Magento 2.1.0.
  • Readiness check. If everything is ok, you can see “green light” and are able to start the upgrade. If something is wrong, make sure that your cron jobs are not active.

Terminal

To use the terminal you also need to apply the patch MDVA-532.

The following commands need to be entered into the terminal:

composer require magento/product-community-edition 2.1.0 --no-update composer update

After it is completed, run:
php bin/magento setup:upgrade

to update database schema and data.

On the homepage you can see if the system is updated. If there are errors, reset file permissions and ownership and then clean cache.