Version 13.4 of brXM has arrived - release notes

RELEASE NOTES

Bloomreach Experience Manager V13.4

Bloomreach Experience Manager Developer Edition V13.4

Highlights for V13.4

Hello all, we have released a new version of Bloomreach Experience Manager (brXM). This minor release introduces new functionality and a number of useful improvements. In this document we will give a brief overview of the highlights in this release.

Please note that due to our security release policy the availability of the community source code and artifacts for all active releases will follow in about six weeks. Customers have immediate access to new releases.

Please note that this minor release is the final minor of the V13 series of brXM. This means that the code is maintained for a longer period compared to a normal minor release.

Everything mentioned is an integral part of Bloomreach Experience Manager (brXM) and the developer edition. If a feature only applies to brXM and nor for the developer edition, this is explicitly mentioned.

You can also find these release notes at: https://documentation.bloomreach.com/about/release-notes/release-notes-overview.html

What’s new for developers

Improved CRISP logging of outgoing requests

When CRISP is used to perform outbound REST calls, the response time can now be logged. This is very convenient for profiling, optimization and debugging. The log format is now:

space:{}, op:{}, t:{}ms, verb:{}, sc:{}, path:{}, params:{}

Example log entry:

19.07.2019 16:16:58 INFO http-nio-8080-exec-5 [ResourceResolverProfiler.profile:91] space:commercetools, op:resolve, t:132ms, verb:GET, sc:200, path:categories?where=%28id%3D%22{externalReferenceId}%22%20or%20ancestors%28id%3D%22{externalReferenceId}%22%29%29, params:{externalReferenceId=7ab87c3e-f6b9-405f-b48a-291375d4029a}

SPA SDK improvements

Although released separately and not strictly part of the brXM product, version 0.2.1 of bloomreach-experience-ng-sdk was released. This version now works with Angular Universal and therefore supports server side rendering. Improvements and bug fixes include:

  • Fix incorrect Page Model API URL when there is a query string in the page URL.
  • Add SSO handshake introduced in 13.X.
  • Fix error with undefined window object in an app running with Angular Universal.
  • Add correct platform-specific hostname detection.
  • Add the possibility to pass the request object on server-side rendering via REQUEST token.

Also, a new version of bloomreach-experience-react-sdk (0.6.0) was released:

  • Fix bug with query string affecting the path parsing.
  • Fixed CmsPage children to not be wrapped around a function.
  • Added support of custom React components for container components

The SPA SDKs can be found at [1] and [2].

New CKEditor plugin ‘iframedialog’

The standard CKEditor iframedialog plugin will be shipped with brXM from now on. This plugin can be used to show dialogs, e.g. the Bynder Open UI plugin uses this iframedialog plugin to render the Bynder image picker. Shipping it with the product by default ensures that customers don’t have to manually copy and install it. All CKEditor plugins used in the product are listed at [3].

Relevance improvements (brXM only)

Creating cluster wide scheduled SQL jobs for cleaning relevance request logs can be configured. Several customers have been asking for this feature and it is available from this release onwards.

Other news for developers

  • We’ve added a few new samples of OpenUI extensions to our publicly available ui-extensions examples repository: a GIF image picker using Giphy, a Google Analytics integration, an Unsplash free stock images integration, and a Sitemorse analytics and auditing extension. You can find these and other example Open UI extensions here [4].
  • We have added a new Essentials plugin; the Kitchen Sink. This is a convenience plugin that installs all enterprise plugins at once. This makes it very easy to setup a project with all recommended features enabled.

What’s new for end-users

Automatic image cropping on upload

The system now can automatically crop images when they are uploaded, next to the automatic upscaling or downscaling that was already present. This setting can be configured in the Gallery Manager tool in Essentials.

Manageable selection field support in Visual Editing

Selection fields powered by a CMS-managed “value list” are now also exposed in Visual Editing.

Other news for end-users

  • Cancel button for document editing. You can now explicitly discard changes and stop editing using a ‘cancel’ button.

Minor release

V13.4 is a minor release so it is backwards compatible with the previous minor release. Also, updating to this version from the previous minor version should be of little effort. Please see the upgrade and update documentation [5] for details.

Supported Technologies

The full system requirements can be found in the online system requirements [6]. This page also includes a detailed table of maintained third party compatibility.

End-of-life, support and maintained code

Nomenclature refresher

As the terms ‘end-of-life’, ‘supported’, ‘maintained’ are used in various ways in our industry, we clarify the nomenclature we use for this below.

Supported product version

When a product is supported, this means that the customer will receive help from the helpdesk when issues arise as described in the service level agreement (SLA) that the customer has with Bloomreach. There are several service levels available.

Please note that if a bug is acknowledged in a supported, but not-maintained version, and a fix is needed, this fix will only be applied in the maintained product versions. This means the customer will need to move to a maintained version to receive the fix.

Maintained product version

When a product is maintained, the product code is updated and security- and bug fixes are made to the code. For maintained products, the system requirements for third party libraries and components is kept updated as well. Please note that we do not provide support for system requirement providers (e.g. databases, java, etc…), but we only support the usage for mentioned certified system requirement providers.

If a product is non-maintained, this means that the code is not maintained anymore and therefore might contain bugs and/or security vulnerabilities due to newly discovered issues in our code, or the libraries used.

End-of-life product version

Products that are not maintained and not supported are end-of-life. These might be available from our archives but could be removed without notice.

What does this mean for the current release?

Please note that this release changes the maintenance mode of V13.2 to ‘Not maintained’.

In the table below you can find the support status of your product and when support will end; this is dependent on the version currently being used and license level. Please note that versions that are not listed are not active and not supported, and therefore end-of-life.

Security best practice

  • Bloomreach recommends our customers to conduct formal user access reviews on a quarterly basis. The purpose is to ensure unauthorized users are removed and active users’ permissions are appropriately granted or removed according to move, add, change and delete processes.

Availability

This version of brXM is available as from September 20, 2019 onwards. Please note that due to our release policy the release of the open source CMS / developer release will follow in approximately six weeks after this date.

Links

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/bloomreach-experience-ng-sdk

[2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/bloomreach-experience-react-sdk

[3] https://documentation.bloomreach.com/library/concepts/document-types/html-fields/ckeditor-plugins.html

[4] https://github.com/bloomreach/ui-extensions/tree/master/samples

[5] https://documentation.bloomreach.com/about/upgrade/introduction.html

[6] https://documentation.bloomreach.com/library/about/system-requirements.html