RELEASE NOTES
Bloomreach Experience Manager V14.5
Bloomreach Experience Manager Developer Edition V14.5
Highlights for V14.5
We are pleased to announce a new version of Bloomreach Experience Manager (brXM). This minor release introduces new functionality and a number of useful improvements to the product. In this post we will give a brief overview of the highlights in this release. You can also find these release notes at: https://documentation.bloomreach.com/about/release-notes/release-notes-overview.html
Please note that as a result of our security release policy the public availability of the community source code and artifacts for all active releases will follow in about six weeks. Customers however, have immediate access to these new releases at the release date.
Everything mentioned in this document is an integral part of Bloomreach Experience Manager (brXM) and the developer edition, unless mentioned otherwise. If a feature only applies to brXM and not to the developer edition, this is explicitly mentioned. Features that are mentioned as part of brXM also apply to brX.
Key New Features
Visual editor improvements
The visual editor is widely used to edit content from within the Experience Manager and allows users to make changes in the preview environment. Editors can make changes on the fly, while keeping focus on the page being worked on and inspecting changes made directly. With brXM v14.5, additional functionality is added to allow more flexibility in working with compound fields and adding and removal of multiple fields.
- It is now possible to add or remove multiples for primitive and compound fields from the visual editor
- We’ve added drag and drop functionality for multiple fields, allowing these fields to be ordered differently while staying in the Experience Manager and see the changes on the website directly before publishing the changes.
- Working with compound fields in the visual editor has become easier - newly added compounds will no longer shift to the bottom of the document by default, but instead will appear in the place where they are added. This allows users to start populating the compound fields quicker and easier.
Note: Optional fields are not yet supported for the visual editor, these can only be shown in the content perspective.
Decoupled front-ends & SPA integration improvements
As part of our ongoing efforts to improve the way brXM integrates with decoupled front-end applications and SPAs, we’ve implemented a significant number of improvements and fixes in this area.
- The Page Model API now shows a clearer distinction between various compounds.
- To inspect differentiation based on product type backing in the PMA, this info is now included in meta info.
- We’ve fixed expanded and selected menu states in the PMA and SPA SDK
- Targeting integration with SPAs + Express middleware has been simplified.
- SPA SDK debuggers for internal logic have been added. This makes it much simpler to debug issues with SPA integrations, in particular in setting up the preview in the Experience Manager.
Improved component properties panel for customers using Relevance
The relevance module allows marketers to customize the appearance of their channels based on the characteristics of individual visitors. With v14.5 we’ve made improvements to working with relevance in the Experience Manager by adding this to the right side panel. This makes it easier to quickly edit a variant, add segments or characteristics, trends and targeting after which the experiment can be started right from the Experience Manager.
GraphQL Service and Commerce React Components
For more details specifically on this release of the GraphQL Service and Commerce React Components see: brX GraphQL Service Release Notes - Bloomreach Experience - Open Source CMS.
Discounts and Coupons for commercetools
The commercetools connector now supports adding coupon codes/discounts via a GraphQL Cart mutation. This means a shopper can add a coupon code at checkout and get x% off the total purchase (update value upon adding valid coupon).
Inventory Data Source for Shopify
It is now possible to query a product’s inventory with the Shopify connector. This will allow front-ends to enable conditions on adding products to cart and/or updating quantities. For this feature we’ve introduced the InventoryDataSource and associated types. By adding a separate DataSource, it is clearer to API clients that they should invoke this query separately in their pages.
brSM Pathways and Recommendations support added
The method findItemsByWidget has been added to support Pathways and Recommendations. The implementation of the Data Source calls the corresponding Search and Merchandising Pathways and Recommendations API based on the widgetType which corresponds to an API family. According to the algorithm used, all parameters are optional (it is up to the front-end to determine which are mandatory).
Ongoing Improvements
For end users
- Translations support for experience pages - With the release of Experience Pages, we disabled the translations functionality for experience pages as this could lead to confusing situations. Based on customer requests, we’ve re-enabled this button. Please note that components placed on an experience page need to be translated separately from the experience page’s translation workflow.
- Cancel scheduled publication / take offline for experience pages can now be done by editors and admins from the page menu in the Experience Manager.
For developers
- In a case where the index feature was used below default site map item, the sitemap would show all items as ‘index’. This has been fixed.
- HST link tags now support anchors across documents, allowing for internal links to be created to specific anchors in a document or page that makes use of an internal link.
- We’ve added a URL validator to the services-validation module to check whether a field contains a valid URL.
Notices
There are no notices for this release.
Minor release
V14.5 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. Specific upgrade instructions for this release can be found in our documentation [1] for enterprise customers (requires a login). An overview of all upgrade instructions for minor versions in this major release can be found in our documentation [2] as well.
Supported Technologies
The full system requirements can be found in the online system requirements [3]. 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 does not change any maintenance or support mode.
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 notes
There are no specific security notes for this release.
Availability
This version of brXM is available as of March 2, 2020 onwards. Please note that this release contains security fixes, and 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://documentation.bloomreach.com/14/library/upgrade-minor-versions/upgrade-14.4-to-14.5.html
[2] https://documentation.bloomreach.com/14/about/upgrade/introduction.html
[3] https://documentation.bloomreach.com/library/about/system-requirements.html