Release: 2.4
new default theme "Chocolatine"
Front-Commerce 2.4 brings a new base theme to accelerate your time to market. It contains several accessibility improvements, and provides a better user experience out of the box.
Don't miss what our 2.3 version brought!
Front-Commerce 2.3 & 2.4 are separate releases that were developed jointly. While 2.3 was focused on feature coverage, 2.4 focused on a new theme.
Please read our Front-Commerce 2.3 release announcement to know about recent features.
Meet "Chocolatine", our new default theme
"Chocolatine" on our demo store: magento2.front-commerce.app
We have been working on a new starter theme for future projects. Our goal was to improve our base theme so that new projects could start with a theme that was good enough to prototype and iterate.
After some research, we've decided to leverage the great UX and UI work from the ICEO team and use it as an starting point. It's name is "Chocolatine" in reference to the correct way to pronounce "Pain au chocolat" in French ;-)
This new theme provides a flexible foundation, ready to be adapted according to the merchant's brand. It allows to deploy a new store in weeks instead of months. It is already used in production by some of our customers.
A ready-to-use User Interface
This new theme improves the User experience, with a special focus on mobile uses:
- mobile ready
- key information displayed by default (shipping delays, payment methods, reassurance elements…),
- clearer product pages with highlighted sales and accessible product configurator,
- a purchase process located within scroll reach,
- an additional information area designed for extension with your product data,
- efficient category filters,
- seamless checkout,
- product recommendations area,
- mega menu with mobile version
Accessibility improvements
We used the opportunity of this new theme to improve the overall accessibility:
- better keyboard navigation,
- direct access to the content,
- more semantic markup usage,
- mobile accessibility (touch events…)
Default eCommerce components in the core
Over time, we detected that Front-Commerce projects often had to reimplemented some components not available in our default theme.
The Chocolatine theme contains components for common features:
- carousel: scroll or swipe between several slides, products or content,
- push blocks and feature highlights: ensure that your visitors understand what makes you stand out from your competitors, reassure visitors to increase sales,
- featured products: from your home page, on the product page or from the cart,
- a search bar: make it easy for your customers to find the perfect product in a big catalog
Performance improvements
The user perceived performance was improved. We introduced UI skeletons and a faster display for "above the fold" content on several pages.
New feature: invoices
A new feature landed in this release too. Magento 2 invoices are now displayed in the Customer account. Customers can print them from the web, and developers can customize the print layout to match their needs.
In Front-Commerce 2.3, it was already possible to link to external binary files (e.g PDF) for invoices. Merchants are now free to use whatever solution works from them depending on their context.
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