Aimeos 2022.10 Long Term Support has been released – What's new?

Without a doubt, Aimeos is the most flexible Laravel ecommerce framework in the world. It continues to involve its users and their requirements. With every new release, it tries to simplify the development process.

The most awaited Aimeos 2022.10 version with long term support is available now for TYPO3 and Laravel. It includes a lot of improvements for editors, customers, developers, and marketplace owners. While the second release of this year, Aimeos 2022.07 was known as developer friendly.

In this blog, we unpack what is new and noteworthy in Aimeos 2022.10; so, you can get the most out of the latest version of the Aimeos. Following are the most important improvements included:

• GraphQL administration API
• Direct editing of marketplace items
• Headless Laravel distribution
• Dynamic supplier filter
• Customers can save their baskets
• Invoice numbers per site
• Performance Optimization
• 404 Improvements
• SEO Enhancements

GraphQL Administration API

The GraphQL API for administration is one of the greatest improvements in the Aimeos 2022.10 long term support release. It allows developers to manage products and other data in Aimeos in an easier way compared to the JSON REST admin API. Particularly, refreshing few related resources can be possible in one API call now instead of requiring ten or more calls. The GraphQL application programming interface is additionally more aligned to document based on storage like Elasticsearch.

A GraphQL mutation to store a new product and return its ID looks like:

mutation {
  saveProduct(input: {
    code: "test-graphql",
    lists: {
      media: [{
        type: "test"
        item: {
          type: "download",
          url: "https://local/test.jpg",
          preview: "https://local/test-small.jpg"
          property: [{
            type: "copyright",
            value: "Aimeos"
          }]
        }
      }],
      text: [{
        type: "name",
        item: {
          type: "name",
          languageid: "de",
          content: "Some text"
        }
      }]
    },
    property: [{
      type: "prodcode",
      value: "abcd-1234"
    }]
  }) {
    id
  }
}

Edit marketplace items directly

In the latest long-term support of Aimeos 2022.10; editors can update or delete any items created in a sub-site of the current one directly, which is completely convenient in marketplace setups to fix items of vendors very swiftly. While in the past, the editors need to go back to the site where images, texts, or any other products related attributes had been created before they could delete or modify those items.

For all those associated items (and also for acquired ones) where there is no space for the additional data is available, the Aimeos backend shows the meta information like site, editor, and creation/modification time while floating over the item now. Hence, you can see and review promptly from which site the item is coming from and also who built / edited it, and when.

Headless Laravel Distribution

The Aimeos headless distribution based on Laravel 9 is available with Aimeos 2022.10 long term support and it is now stable too. It is customized for Laravel developers who want to develop end-to-end frontend in JavaScript using VueJs, ReactJs or any other JS framework. JSON web tokens are utilized in the headless distribution for verification and Aimeos JSON REST API offers access to the complete front-end functionalities.

Dynamic Supplier Filter

For the users who have hundreds, thousands or more manufacturers, brands and suppliers or distributors in their Aimeos store, the new supplier filter provides searching for those items dynamically. Subsequently, it is not important to preload a restricted set of the products.

The Dynamic supplier filter allows customers to look for any supplier based on their name and it additionally finds sub-strings in the supplier names. When you open the filter, the most frequently used supplier is listed first and found at the top.

Customers can save their baskets

The most helpful feature of Aimeos 2022.10 is that, the customers can save their baskets now. It is very helpful for B2B clients who want to sell their items to their customers and want to save the baskets until they get the finalization. Each basket has a descriptive name.

Just like the order history, the saved baskets are recorded in the profile section. Once finalized, customers can select one of the saved baskets and keep all products into the current basket with a single click and proceeding to the checkout.

Invoice numbers per site

The Aimeos 2022.10 have added an invoice ID column to the locale site table. The individual successive invoice numbers are essential for each vendor when it comes to SaaS setup and marketplace. For each order placement, it creates a new unique invoice ID after the payment was successful.

To identify each order uniquely from all over site, the ID from the order table is still used. In addition, the created invoice ID is stored in the order table. With the use of ordernumber marco, it can be formatted before added to the emails or the PDFs:

use \Aimeos\Mshop\Order\Item\Standard as Order;
Order::method( ‘ordernumber’, function( \Aimeos\Mshop\Order\Item\Iface $order ) {
    return ‘RE-‘ . date( ‘Y’ ) . ‘-‘ . $order->getInvoiceNumber();
} );

Performance Optimization

The job controllers often recapitulate over a large result set and using the limit and offset values in slice() of the search filter cause long response times until the database found in the requested slice. It can take several seconds if the overall result set is more than 100k rows.

Aimeos offers a cursor based iterate () method in each manager now for performance optimization:

$manager = \Aimeos\MShop::create( $this->context(), 'product' );
$cursor = $manager->cursor( $manager->filter()->add( 'product.instock', '==', 1 );
while( $items = $manager->iterate( $cursor, ['price'] ) ) {
    // process items
}

The new iterate() method is the most useful if you require to process a large result set completely.

Moreover, the column order of all indexes in the Aimeos tables have been optimized to get the best performance for the most often used queries.

404 Improvements

In the previous releases of Aimeos, the pages with invalid categories / product ids or with no content returned a page without content instead of 404 error. In this Aimeos 2022.10 LTS release, all the product detail pages, CMS pages, category list pages which are not available, return a “404 not found” error.

SEO Enhancements

A great news for the ecommerce SEO experts! The schema.org markup in the list and detail views has been improved for getting the enhanced results in Google. It is used to tell search engine that what is the name, image, price, and description of the product and it contains now additional markup for the Google merchant listings. Moreover, the breadcrumbs from the catalog stage component are now also machine readable for Google.

Wrapping up

Aimeos latest stable version will get bugfixes and security patches and supported for another four years with extended support (ELTS). After any release, it is always recommended to upgrade to the latest Aimeos 2022.10 LTS. It always adds more value and make your and developer’s work easier than ever. Hire Laravel developers to upgrade your current Aimeos ecommerce application.

Our Contribution in Aimeos community

Braintree Payment Integration

Aimeos Braintree payment gateway extension provides Braintree payment gateway integration option for customers as well as in administration interface. It is for multi-vendor marketplaces.

Blog Extension

Aimeos blog extension provide blog features like tags, categories, and authors in Aimeos through which customer will be able add blogs within their applications.

Points & Rewards Extension

Aimeos Points & Rewards extension is integrating the functionality where customers can collect points by each product purchase and get rewards like discounts if certain level is reached. This extension is only available for Laravel applications!

We are official international ecommerce expert partners of Aimeos.

We provide complete Aimeos ecommerce development services including store design, development, customization, content management, upgrades, migration, multi-channel multi-vendor marketplace, multi-tenant SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions, maintenance, and support. Our expert Laravel developers are experienced in handling multidisciplinary and multi-technology projects of all sizes. In case if you have any requirements, feel free to share all your requirements via following request a quote form or email us at [email protected].