The Open Source Magento Ecommerce system has just come out with a new production version of 1.1! This new version has some new advacements/features that are very interesting. Check it out.

More product-types

With Magento 1.1 you can now create a few new product types. Bundles most commonly used in the “built to order” product model. And Virtual Products – products that don’t require shipping information.

More ways to configure products

• Custom Product Options – allow merchants to designate a SKU to a base item and add attributes instead of having to create a unique SKU for every combination of options (simple products).
• Personalized Products – a new product configuration feature in Magento 1.1 that allows customers to personalize products by adding images or text, such as embroideries, engravings, etc.

Integrate with any application via Web Services

Magento 1.1 features a new Webservices API with methods for easy integration between Magento’s Catalog, Customer and Sales modules and any third party application. This appears to be something similar to what Drupal has with their “Drupal API”.

Speeding up the process(ing)

One of the main goals for Magento 1.1 was to examine bottlenecks in the
platform and improve performance. In the production release of Magento
1.1 performance was improved by as much as 40% in the catalog and sales
modules, and by optimizing when and how data loads, responsiveness of
the Admin UI was also increased significantly. This is an important one. One of the downfalls of the previous versions of Magento were all the complaints about how slow it was. Hopefully this actually translates into some faster page loading.

If you’re not sure what Magento is you can read an article I wrote a few weeks back titled “What Open Source Shopping Cart Should I Use?” where I talked about Magento and some of it’s features and benefits.