Release: 2.6

HTTP Caching, Store credits, Wishlist sharing and remote configurations

Front-Commerce 2.6 embraces HTTP Caching to bring your storefront performance to a whole new level.

Leverage proxy or CDN caching to get the performance of static websites with the flexibility you'd expect for a dynamic eCommerce storefront. We're eager to see what you will do with this!

We've also added new features (Store credits, wishlist improvements, remote configuration), updated our dependencies and fixed several issues.

New Feature: Store Credits

In this release, we've continued to increase our feature coverage by implementing Store Credits. Customers can use store credits to (partially or fully) pay for their order. They can view their credits history and the current balance from their account dashboard.

While the UI is platform agnostic, we implemented the supporting server implementation in the Magento1 Enterprise module. It is fully integrated in the workflow you are used to and administrators can issue Store Credits from the admin panel as usual.

Wishlist improvements: send by email and save product options

Wishlists are now also supported for Magento 1. They were only available for Magento 2 so far.

We've also added several new features to make wishlists even more useful for Customers:

• product options are now saved to the wishlist. It reduces the friction (selecting the size or color of a product) when customers are ready to purchase a product
• customers can share their wishlist by email using the native Magento feature
• recipients can then browse the wishlist content and add some items or the whole list to their cart

On product listing pages, the "is in wishlist" feature for product items caused performance issues with our new HTTP caching mechanism. We've also revamped our implementation to reduce the number of GraphQL queries sent by the client. It is now much more efficient! Please read our migration guide for further details.

Remote configurations

Front-Commerce configurations are at the core of our product. Configuration providers allow developers to access configurations in an homogeneous way, no matter how they are defined. Be it an API Key, a text or other preferences administrable by a store owner, developers can now fetch values from a remote source without any code change.

The first module to leverage this feature is our Magento 1 Algolia integration. It will reuse the configurations from your Magento administration area without needing to duplicate them. Future Front-Commerce releases will contain more improvements like this for other modules.

Dependencies updates

We've updated many of our dependencies to their latest backwards compatible version. Our migration guide lists the main changes.

Since Node.js 10.x reaches its end of life tomorrow, the required minimum Node.js version has been updated to the version 12.22.1.

🚀 Performance: build instant storefronts that scale

Front-Commerce 2.6 brings new primitives and low-level improvements to help you leverage underrated HTTP Caching standards. Developers now have a fine-grained control for two important Cache-Control values: s-maxage and stale-while-revalidate sent by Front-Commerce.

Basically, it means that store owners can now scale their storefront for huge traffic peaks by sacrificing freshness of data:

• is it a big deal to have a change on your homepage visible at most 30 seconds later, if it allows to display it in less than 100ms to thousands of users visiting your store after a TV advertising?
• will you allow a customer to view a product page with information up to 30 minutes old if nobody browsed the page since that time? 10 minutes? 10 seconds only?
• what about a CMS page, your contact form or login page?
• what about a specific set of products or categories that changes only once per year?
• … you decide, not us!

You may have heard about the Jamstack, Static Site Generators (SSG) or global edge networks. We think that generating a static storefront is not yet realistic for merchants with a significant catalog and lots of stock moves. Innovations are bubbling up in the ecosystem and many promising patterns are experimented as we write this. We've decided to lay this foundation stone towards our static future with simple, standard and proven Web features.

This release allows to speed up the rendering of the initial page load (SSR) and also any further navigation interaction happening client-side! It is however limited to visitors only yet (to prevent caching sensitive information).

Technically speaking, a reverse-proxy or a CDN is needed to benefit from this feature and Front-Commerce Cloud supports it out-of-the-box of course!

We are really excited by this first step and are listening to your feedbacks as you start using it in your specific context. Together, let's make it even better!

Other changes

• a new array-or-asterisk-wildcard configuration type has been added. It is useful for authorization lists for instance
• analytics integrations can now adapt their configuration to the user consents
• the cookie bar now display a "Deny all" button by default
• improved the success page UI to display more obvious "pending" payment messages to users (for payment modules that supports it)
• improved the Payline module to handle more error scenarios and have a better payment step integration
• the current shipping and billing addresses are now exposed in the Cart GraphQL type
• improved typography and fix mistakes in the french translations
• sitemap generation is now using the search datasources for more efficiency
• guest orders are now tracked as other orders in eCommerce analytics integrations
• not shippable orders (with virtual products only) don't have a "Delivered to" area on the recap page any more
• improved the perCurrency cache strategy (Magento 1) to prevent creating sessions for anonymous visitors
• fixed several component PropTypes and other warnings in our Storybook stories
• fixed incorrect Guest detection in Cart that could lead to some embedded payments sending incorrect customer details
• fixed invoices loading in Magento 2 when increment id did not matched their entity id
• fixed the <Selector> component (theme Chocolatine only) to always send the selected value!
• fixed products and CMS pages duplication in the Magento 1 sitemap

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