Magento recently released their latest security patch (SUPEE-7405) and point release (1.9.2.3). This release fixes a variety of security issues. In addition to the security updates an additional patch SUPEE-7616 was released. This patch updates the USPS integration to be compatible with recent changes in the USPS API.

Official Magento Release Notes

The official release notes for 1.9.2.3 suggest that the only changes are the addition of the two newly released patches. Therefore functionally, an install of 1.9.2.3 should be comparable to 1.9.2.2 with the new patches applied.

Pedantic Developer Release Notes

Whilst the official release notes aren’t exactly wrong, they aren’t entirely accurate either. Whenever a new version is released alongside a patch, I do a file by file comparison to confirm any differences. This process entails applying the patches to a clean 1.9.2.2 install and comparing the files to a clean copy of 1.9.2.3. Unfortunately since the previous release was last year, the copyright has been updated in every file of the new release. A quick find and replace later and we can look for any relevant changes. There are many ways to compare files, but my weapon of choice is deltawalker.

1. A performance enhancement for the block / variable validation – There were some complaints after patch SUPEE-6788 that the whitelist wasn’t loaded in one hit and cached. Some people were seeing performance degradation due to the additional queries. This update wasn’t included in the patch.
2. 5 additional translations – The new strings included are all from new error messages in the patches.
3. Updates to year strings (2015 > 2016) – This has been done in a few random templates / xml default paths
4. A license update from osl 3 > afl 3 in system.xml for Mage_ImportExport
5. An assortment of random/minor whitespace/docblock changes
6. Quite a large number of additions changes to the dev folder – There are new tests as well as modifications to existing files. Since this directory isn’t meant to be deployed live, I didn’t break the changes down any further.

For the truly pedantic, there were obviously also additions to the changelog, and the files in var/package/ have changed name.

Conclusion

If your site is currently running on a clean install of 1.9.2.2 then you should upgrade to 1.9.2.3 and therefore benefit from the minor optimisations. If however you are operating on a modified version (tut, tut) or older version, the patches should adequately get the job done for you.