Release: 3.2 & 2.28

New packages, a Magic Button revamp, Attraqt recommendations and cloud improvements!

Happy New Year, everyone! We hope you had a great holiday season and are ready to start the new year with a bang.

We are excited to introduce a range of new features and enhancements to Front-Commerce's core. While we are still prioritizing core fixes and stabilization, we have also been able to ship some significant features to Front-Commerce Remixed: all Magento 1 modules, Adyen Payment, and Akamai Image Manager are now available as standalone packages under the @front-commerce/*** namespace.

We have also revamped the technical foundations of the Magic Button and introduced a new concept called server services in Front-Commerce 3.2.

The 2.x branch also received some love with the introduction of Attraqt personalized recommendations and a few bug fixes. Be sure to upgrade to Front-Commerce 2.28! As time progresses, we anticipate more projects transitioning to 3.x, and the number of new features released for both major versions will gradually decrease.

Let's dive in and explore what's new in Front-Commerce, and for Front-Commerce Cloud customers.

Improvements to Front-Commerce Remixed

The following features and enhancements are available in Front-Commerce 3.2 only. They're direct improvements to Front-Commerce 3.x, and new features for projects using our Remix version.

New extensions for Front-Commerce Remixed

With a stable foundation in place, we're now able to focus on Remixing the remaining core Front-Commerce extensions.

This release includes the following features:

• all Magento1 modules are now available in the @front-commerce/magento1 package. Follow the Magento1 extension's documentation to learn how to use it.
• Adyen payment integration is also available in the @front-commerce/adyen package
• Akamai Image Manager integration is available in the @front-commerce/akamai-image-manager package

Contribution mode and Magic Button

Six months ago, we introduced the Magic Button. A feature that improves the contribution experience and makes content editing more efficient.

With Front-Commerce 3.x, we've revamped the technical foundations of the Magic Button to embrace Web standards and improve how it works. This new version is now available in Front-Commerce 3.2.

It means that all supported extensions (Magento2, Contentful…) now have full feature-parity with Front-Commerce 2.x when it comes to identifying storefront content, previewing unpublished content, auto-refresh etc.

Server Services (unstable API)

On a technical level, we've also introduced a new concept: Server Services.

Why? Until now, several Front-Commerce core features provided a way to register some custom logic using loaders. Examples:

• loaders.Sitemap.registerNodesFetcher
• loaders.Page.registerUrlMatcher
• loaders.ContentMetadataExtractorRegistry.register

It forced developers to manually create loaders when wanting to use these features outside of a GraphQL context, such as in an express middleware.

What? Server Services is our proposal for relocating such responsibilities outside of "loaders" so that GraphQL loaders remain responsible only for fetching data from remote sources.

How? We've introduced a lifecycle hook API that allows developers to register custom logic into core Services. Core Services are injected more globally, and can be used in GraphQL (context enhancers, loaders, resolvers) but also in the application's routes as they're part of the FrontCommerceApp object.

You can read the current API design in our documentation. We'd love to hear your feedbacks on this, please let us know how you feel about this!

Other changes

Performance improvements

• Layout and root route no longer revalidates by default, to prevent useless extra HTTP requests

Features

• A feature flag has been added to check whether the ordersFilters feature is supported by the backend in use.
• We added a front-commerce CLI find-unused-style-variables script to check for unused SCSS variables and CSS custom properties
• DX: DEBUG=front-commerce:config output is now less verbose
• DX: a new /__front-commerce/debug route now displays useful context information (user, request, configuration…) in development mode
• UI: the search input is now automatically focused when opening the search toolbar
• UI: all inputs now have ref and TypeScript types
• UI: the <Image /> component is now more resilient to empty src
• Magento: it is now possible to filter order using a "OR" logic between filters (see the Migration guide)
• Magento: user objects now have a loggedIn attribute to check whether the user is logged in or not more easily across the application
• Algolia: the extension now supports optional words in search queries. Usage examples: searchQuery.addOptionalWords("some optional words") or searchQuery.addOptionalWords(["word", "word1 word2"])

Bug Fixes

• cookie: we fixed the Cookie SameSite setting to allow remote injection and SSO support
• UI: the shipping method selection now works as expected when several ones are available
• UI: the status in the orders table filter allowing can now be updated after it has been set once
• UI: regions are now only fetched when a country needs a region
• core: re-exported routes from core modules don't crash under some circumstances due to namespace exports (leading to undefined data in useLoaderData())
• cache: prevent cart cache issues due to uncommitted session in Cart routes

New features available for every project

The following features and enhancements are available in both Front-Commerce 3.2 and 2.28. Update to the version relevant to your project to take advantage of these features.

Attraqt: personalized recommendations

When it comes to e-commerce, personalization is key. It's a proven way to increase conversion rates and average order value. That's why we're excited to announce that Front-Commerce now supports Attraqt personalization.

You can now use Attraqt to display personalized product recommendations on your Front-Commerce storefront. No matter how you use Attraqt on the front-end (contact your Attraqt representative to find the best way for your use case), as soon as you have the user profile ID, you can use it to display personalized recommendations.

The Attraqt recommendations loader now accepts an optional profileId parameter that can be used to display personalized recommendations.

Bug Fixes

• adyen: when using the Magento2 module, the amount (and countryCode) are now properly passed to Apple Pay
• twicpics: the aspect ratio is now properly computed whenever using the twicpics image adapter
• ui: the <ProductListSlider /> component is now more resilient to incorrect data passed, and can display an empty component instead of crashing

Front-Commerce Cloud got an upgrade

We've upgraded our Front-Commerce Cloud infrastructure during the end of the year. Without entering into too much technical detail, you should expect better performance and better stability for your Front-Commerce Cloud projects. You may already have noticed it!

This upgrade contains several improvements consolidating our experience with Front-Commerce Cloud projects over the years. These changes have been rolled out progressively during the last weeks, without noticeable downtime for your projects.

We rolled out improvements to how Front-Commerce projects are deployed and managed:

• we are now able to handle unexpected huge traffic spikes more efficiently with a specific "operation" mode that can be enabled within minutes
• we now support the Stale-While-Revalidate HTTP cache strategy, for instant page loads
• we've improved the way staging and production environments are handled, to reduce the risk of side effects while maintaining a high level of similarity between environments
• we also introduced a future-proof DNS configuration for every project, to ease any future transitions

These changes also enable other improvements you'll see very soon. For example, you'll be autonomous when it comes to flushing the HTTP cache of your project, for a specific URL a directory or the whole project. This will be useful to quickly flush the cache after a content update.

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Fixes from 3.2 and 2.28 have also been backported into previous minor versions. The following patch versions were released: 3.1.2, 3.0.2, 2.27.1, 2.26.5, 2.25.7, 2.24.8, and 2.23.9.

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Upgrade Front-Commerce (Migration guides): 3.2.0 or 2.28.0
Read the full changelog (Customers only): 3.2.0 or 2.28.0

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