Major changes in code architecture

In short, Magento 2 is built almost from scratch, and huge portions of old Magento 1.x have been rewritten to a new standard that allows Magento to grow in the years ahead. Shortcuts to classes are now full classnames - so a call like Mage::getModel('catalog/product') becomes Mage::getModel('Mage_Catalog_Model_Product'). The definition-folder of app/etc/modules has been simply removed. There are no more code pools (core, community, local), everything sits right into app/code/. - so a module like app/code/community/Yireo/Trashcan will simply be moved to app/code/Yireo/Trashcan. And there's much more: Dependancy injection, object manager, containers (besides blocks).

More security, faster code

One of the main goals of Magento 2 has been to become much less complex and gain speed. ProtoType is exchanged for jQuery. Minimum requirement is PHP 5.4. And there has been a lot of cleaning up of code, even though the class structures (classes that have parents that have parents that have parents) is still complex.

Things have become a bit more secure: For instance, files that need to be accessed from the browser (JavaScript, CSS, images) are placed in a pub-folder, so that all other files (the main Magento application) can be moved outside of the webroot.

Today is April Fools' Day

And for those of you who did not know what date it was today: It is April Fools' Day. All details of this blog-post are true, except that Magento 2 is not ready yet. We will repeat this blogpost next year.