Magento 2.0 vs 2.1: what are the major/breaking changes?

Question

As you may be aware, 2.1 RC1 was released last week as well as 2.0.7 yesterday.

I know 2.1 implies a lot of changes.

My question is, as a developer, which are the changes I should be aware of and take into consideration ?

I'm not looking for the release notes, I would like a list of stuff that changed in the code that are considered as major changes / breaking changes.

To rephrase it: which changes should I be aware of when coming from 2.0 to 2.1 developer wise ?

Answer 1

The CMS, Catalog and GiftCard modules received a major version bump because methods have been added to API interfaces:

• Magento\Cms\Api\Data\PageInterface
• Magento\Catalog\Api\ProductCustomOptionRepositoryInterface
• Magento\Catalog\Api\ProductLinkRepositoryInterface
• Magento\GiftCard\Api\Data\GiftcardAmountInterface (EE)

Source: https://maxyek.wordpress.com/2016/05/24/2-1-0-rc1-semver-and-major-version-bump/

But this does not count in breaking changes in classes/methods outside the @api service contracts.

Answer 2

If you are asking about changes(developer wise), one of the major breaking changes I've found is the use of UI Components for the Category New/Edit page. Which means that if you've added a custom attribute to category, it will now need to be specified using an XML file catalog_form.xml.

Apparently, this is the way they're going. You can find more details in here. (https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/5942)

Edit

Another thing broken in M2.1 is the configurable swatches. https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/5691 This was working completely fine in the M2.07

Answer 3

Magento provides a list of backward-incompatible changes on the official dev docs. A list is available for each minor version:

2.0: http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/release-notes/backward-incompatible-changes.html 2.1: http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.1/release-notes/backward-incompatible-changes.html 2.2: http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.2/release-notes/backward-incompatible-changes.html

Answer 4

You can read the Release Candidate notes here:

http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/release-notes/ReleaseNotes2.1_RC1CE.html