Introducing Magic Button, Focal Point, Enhanced ElasticSearch, and Adobe B2B Online Payments
Embrace the summer sun with Front-Commerce 2.25! We're excited to unveil several exciting updates that will brighten up your e-commerce experience.
In this release, we introduce the Magic Button™, empowering content contributors like never before. Get ready to elevate visual experiences with the new Focal Point for Images feature. Enjoy enhanced sorting and facets behaviour in ElasticSearch-driven PLPs, and simplify online payments for Negotiable quotes with Adobe B2B.
While you embrace these powerful updates, we're also dedicated to finalizing Front-Commerce Remixed, with the aim of having live projects in production by the end of the year. During the next months, we will reduce new features to their strict minimum and focus on Remixing!
☕ Let's dive into the details of Front-Commerce 2.25…
Empowering content contribution with the Magic Button™
Managing content in a composable architecture comes with its own set of challenges. To address these challenges, we're excited to introduce the Magic Button in Front-Commerce 2.25. This feature expands the scope of a headless storefront by bringing content contributors and stakeholders back into the equation.
With Front-Commerce, developers can now enhance the contribution experience and make it more efficient. When Contribution Mode is enabled, the Magic Button appears, providing access to an Editorial Toolbox with a range of powerful features.
Preview Mode: Get a sneak peek of upcoming content versions on your storefront before publishing them in your CMS (for platforms that support this functionality). Ensure content accuracy and consistency before it goes public.
Auto-refresh: Experience real-time updates of all the data on the screen without the need for manual reloading. Stay up to date with the latest changes effortlessly.
X-Ray: Easily identify the system responsible for underlying data by adding visual outlines around UI components. With a single click, swiftly access the management page for faster backend navigation. Streamline your workflow and save time.
Watch this demo screencast to see the Magic Button in action.
We've worked diligently to ensure that the Magic Button has no impact on the end-user experience or application performance. We've created API primitives, such as components and GraphQL directives, to support these features and make implementation seamless.
Additionally, we've updated our default themes and connectors to enhance the contribution experience when using Magento1/OpenMage LTS, Magento2/Adobe Commerce, and Contentful.
Please refer to our documentation to learn more about the Magic Button and how to implement its features in your projects.
Focal Point: craft better visual experiences with Focal Point for images
Front-Commerce 2.25 introduces a new feature that elevates the visual impact of
your storefront – the "Focal Point" for images. The <Image /> component
and our existing adapters allow you to implement responsive images, serving
optimized versions based on the user's device and layout.
Previously, developers had no control over which part of the image remained
visible when visual space was limited. With the new focalPoint property in
the <Image /> component, you can now specify the focal point coordinates
(x/y) to crop the image around that point. This ensures that the most
important elements of the image remain visible, regardless of the device.
The best part? You can start using this feature right away. We've added
compatibility with all our current image adapters. Our default media proxy,
along with Cloudinary, TwicPics, and Akamai Image Manager, fully supports the
focalPoint functionality.
ElasticSearch: better default sorting and a new facets behaviour
In this release, we've dedicated efforts to enhance the user experience of ElasticSearch-driven Product Listing Pages (PLPs). We've made significant improvements in two crucial areas: sorting and facets behaviour.
With the introduction of the new refinementsFacetsOnly feature flag, you
have more control over how facets are displayed to users. The historical
faceting behaviour, where only facets matching the existing selection were
returned, allowed users to refine their selection incrementally. However, this
required removing filters to select new options.
Example: if users select
“Brand = Adidas”, they will have to remove this filter in order to select “Brand
= Puma”.
By turning off the refinementsFacetsOnly feature flag, the ElasticSearch
module now returns facet values in a"smarter" way. Users can expand their
current selection with new options for a facet without the need to remove
existing filters. This allows for a more seamless and intuitive browsing
experience, enabling users to explore a wider range of products.
Example:
if users select “Brand = Adidas”, they’ll now continue to see other brands as
soon as they have products matching the other selected filters (e.g.: price
range, size, colour, etc…)
Another feature supported in this version is to use facet labels as values in
URLs. This is an opt-in feature that can be enabled with the
useAttributeLabels search configuration. It doesn’t require any code change,
but be careful as it leads to changes in URLs!
In addition to the facets improvements, we've also made enhancements to default sorting in ElasticSearch-driven PLPs. When no user-defined sorting criteria are specified, products are now sorted based on the position defined by merchants in Magento. This default sorting behaviour ensures a consistent and merchant-centric product presentation.
Adobe B2B: Online payments for Negotiable quotes (with Stripe)
Introduced in Front-Commerce 2.23, Negotiable quotes could only be purchased using "offline" payment methods, such as payment on account or bank transfer.
However, we understand the importance of providing convenient online payment options to streamline the purchasing process.
With this release, we've improved the Negotiable checkout to support Front-Commerce payment methods. Now, customers can pay for negotiated quotes online using our Stripe payment module. This integration with Stripe offers a secure and efficient payment experience, eliminating the need for manual payment processing.
Head over to our Stripe documentation to learn how to enable this feature.
Other changes
Performance Improvements
- Auditing performance led us to a change that will likely improve your Core Web Vitals: we no longer preload chunks script tags by default. It allows the loading of critical assets faster by reducing network pressure.
- Sitemap generation is now 50× faster for projects using the ElasticSearch datasources
Features
- node: we dropped official support for node 14 which has reached End-Of-Life
- coupons: coupons now have an explicit “label” GraphQL field, used to display a user-friendly label in the cart, instead of the code for platforms supporting it (supported on Magento2)
- magento2: order details page now displays multiple shipments and tracking numbers
- magento: it is now possible to attribute facets labels as values in URLs, instead of ids
- seo: we added an option to remove filters from canonical URLs on PLPs
Bug Fixes
- facets: filtering by price now keeps the correct user input displayed in the price range text inputs, no matter the tax configuration
- search: we’re now keeping all query input fields, fixing a regression for projects having custom search query inputs
- prismic: empty RichText Prismic fields now display nothing instead of an empty paragraph
- log: we don't log “persisted query not found” errors anymore, it was only an information
- akamai: when using the Akamai Image Adapter locally, generated image URLs are now compatible with the default FC Image proxy to have the same visual aspect
- hipay: we now ensure the external scripts have loaded to prevent edge case issues
- search: we ensured that all datasources implement the required interface for queries autocomplete (regression introduced in 2.24.0 and quickly shipped as 2.24.1)
Fixes from 2.25 have also been backported into previous minor versions. The following patch versions were released: 2.24.2, 2.23.3, 2.22.5, 2.21.5, 2.20.7, 2.19.13, 2.18.11, and 2.17.12.
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