Front-Commerce 1.0.0-beta.0 has been released with several improvements:
revamped elasticsearch queries, translation fallbacks, wishlist, performance…
We are getting really close to the 1.0!
New features
Even though we are still in our beta releases, we don't want to slow down our
customers and keep on adding the features they need.
Improved search experience
While working on our compatibility with Magento 2.3, we decided to use ElasticSuite, a well established Magento extension provided by Smile, that indexes a Magento catalog into Elasticsearch. This was an opportunity for us to rethink how we build search queries thanks to the experience we gained during our own dogfooding. This means that you can now easily customize your queries with a few well thought extension points (add search parameters, customize facets, etc.). More documentation to come.
Moreover, this is the first step of greater plans we are really excited about:
- an improved layered navigation on the client side with more room for customization
- a catalog entirely fetched from Elasticsearch for greater performances (as an optional extension)
Stay tuned!
Wishlist
A Wishlist is now available in Front-Commerce by default with the latest Magento2 module. This is one of the features we wanted to add a long time ago.
However, we didn't have any concrete use cases and weren't able to dogfood its implementation until now. Recently, one of the Front-Commerce's integrators needed it for their own shop. This was the perfect opportunity to add it to the core.
The wishlist feature is still quite simple right now and focuses on saving the wishlist to the customer's account in Magento. But we will keep iterating and add more features according to our clients' customers needs in the future.
Translation fallbacks
Keeping translations synchonized between the core and your own theme could prove
to be troublesome. Indeed, all translations were gathered in
translations/[locale].json files at the root of your project. But when we
added/updated/removed some from the core, you needed to update your own files
manually.
This is no longer the case because in your translations/[locale].json file,
you will be able to only put your custom translation keys and the ones you want
to override from the core.
Read more in our documentation: Translations fallback.
Storybook 5
Your styleguide is now powered by Storybook 5. The interface has been completly overhauled and makes it easier to navigate in your code.
This was also an opportunity to upgrade a few stories and to make sure that languages were loaded dynamically.
A nice tool that we have added by default with this upgrade is the
a11y addon
which let's you run axe-core checks
runs on your components. It is part of our vision to help promoting quality in
your projects, be sure to have a look at this new panel!
Stripe integration
In this release, we also added support for Stripe as a Front-Commerce payment gateway. It means that one can use Stripe, no matter the eCommerce platform behind Front-Commerce.
Our integration is based on the new Stripe foundational API: Payment Intents. This way, you won’t have to worry about the upcoming Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirement: your store will be compliant months before the SCA becomes mandatory (14th of September 2019).
This is also one of the thing that we want to take care for you! All you have to do is keeping your Front-Commerce up-to-date ;-)
We are still working on a complete documentation of Payments in Front-Commerce, but you can already read this comment explaining how to enable Stripe if you want to use it in your application.
Major performance improvements
Our Magento 2 extension has also been updated with Wishlist related features and performance improvements. Some API responses were made 70% faster! Prices, product options, parent products,… many improvements that will improve the raw performance of a page before relying on the redis cache.
This is the kind of free performance wins that you gain by using Front-Commerce. :)
Improved DX
Debugging
Until now, debugging required some internals knowledge to log and learn how the
core worked. To address this, we have started to use
debug, an node package widely used by
the community. It lets you display logs of your application by adding an
environment variable DEBUG.
Read more about it in our documentation: Debugging.
Unstable Magento detected
Magento in a local environment tend to be in an unstable state after commands
like setup:upgrade, setup:di:compile, etc. This is now nicely detected and
the errors will be explicit in GraphQL.
Bugfixes
We also made a few bugfixes such as:
- a11y improvements
- 404 pages were a bit too loose on product and category pages. Some 500 errors were identified as 404, but this is no longer the case.
See it live!
The online demo has been updated and will let you see how things have evolved since then. This is quite an update since we didn't have the opportunity to deploy the demo since 0.14 (june 2018)!
And more
To know more about this release, we recommend you to check the following pages:
- Migration guide from 1.0.0-alpha.2 to 1.0.0-beta.0
- Full changelog from Front-Commerce release notes and its Magento 2 extension (Partners and Customers only)
As always, feel free to send us an email or a Slack message if you have any question.