Aimeos 2021.07 Unveiled – Here Are All The New Features

The second stable version in 2021 of the Aimeos Ecommerce framework has been released. This release has a lot of improvements for multi-site environments especially, with the beautiful new default theme being the most prominent change.

Aimeos is an open source, full-featured, flexible and ultra-fast PHP ecommerce framework with integrations into Laravel, Symfony and TYPO3. Created for solutions ranging from small custom online shops to complex B2B ecommerce applications that scale from 1 to 1,000,000,000+ items and render in 20ms, it is the most widely used Laravel ecommerce platform, already installed 100,000+ times. You can also integrate Aimeos into your existing application.

Aimeos achieves full marks in performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, according to Google Lighthouse.

With so many benefits of using Aimeos Laravel, you might want to make sure that you hire Laravel developers to take full advantage of the technologies.

So let’s dive into what's new and what changes have been made in the Aimeos 2021.07 New Release!

1. New theme
2. Extended order management
3. New Admin settings panel
4. Sending notification emails about orders
5. Multi-site improvements
6. Enhanced security
7. Upgrade Notes

1) New theme

Laravel and the Aimeos e-commerce package can be fully customized and is incredibly flexible. When you install the Aimeos Laravel eCommerce Package, the first change you will notice is the redesigned theme.

The new default theme is fully optimized which enables websites or apps to receive top scores at Google Lighthouse. The content below the main image is created using the powerful Aimeos content management extension. You can add videos, images and text in a custom column layout, and insert product lists in between. Colors can be easily customized using the defined CSS variables, and the theme can be adapted fully according to your requirements. It fully supports right to left languages like Arabic, like the previous theme did.

2) Extended order management

The detail view of the Aimeos Order panel has been expanded. Now the order panel contains warehouse management related fields. It lets you have Lean warehouse management functionality if you do not have any specialized system for that.

3) New settings panel in backend

In this latest version of Aimeos- 2021.07, there is a new panel in the admin backend for adding multiple configuration options like images, theme and shop. The setting is available in "Configuration > Settings". This is useful in multi-site environments especially, as it lets shop owners or site admins to configure basic settings and select themes according to their choice. They can also set their customized domain name in the panel if Laravel and Aimeos installation is configured as multi-site set up. You can extend this panel by adding customized subparts.

4) Sending notification emails about orders

Until the earlier version it was only possible for a shop owner to get separate individual copies of the order confirmation emails sent to customers.

In the new version of Aimeos, an Email delivery service provider sends emails including the order data in customized emails. These emails can contain many orders at once and they are sent when the “order/service/delivery” job controller is executed. So these emails can be sent hourly, or once a day, or immediately, as desired.

The content of the email, and the file attached with the orders can be customized using the delivery service provider templates.

5) Other improvements

There are improvements for multi-site and marketplace setups. The most prominent is the new scheme for storing uploaded files, including preview images. Earlier, all files were stored in 2 main directories and it was almost impossible to find out the location of the files. Now all files are stored by site ID.

Another major improvement is regarding security- the activation of the Content Security Policy (CSP) by default. Now Frontend, where possible, and admin backend are protected by a set of rules which allows Javascript, images, CSS and other code and objects from a very limited set of domains. This stops executing very harmful content from bad visitors and editors in the browser, and prevents cross site scripting. Therefore the CSP rules are an extra security layer to avoid problems related to security such as information leak, session hijacking etc.

6) Upgrade notes

Now, installing the Aimeos 2021.07 version via composer requires composer 2.1+, and the official Aimeos extensions prefixed with “ai-” are installed into “./vendor/aimeos/”. For ease in development, customized extensions can still be put in the ./ext directory.

The directory structure changed, and uploaded files are stored in subdirectories named by the site ID now. Old files stay where they are and are still found, at least in TYPO3 installations. The uploaded files will be stored in an additional sub-directory named “aimeos” in “./public”, in Laravel and Symfony installations.

So old uploaded files will be found only if you move the old paths to the new “./public/aimeos” sub-directory:

mv ./public/files/ ./public/aimeos/files
mv ./public/previews/ ./public/aimeos/previews

Moreover, the themes directory for Laravel installation has changed from “./public/packages/shop” to “./public/vendor/shop”.

Closing words:

Individuals and businesses can take advantage of all possibilities through the best use of Aimeos Ecommerce solutions and the Laravel framework. i-Verve is a well-known Laravel development company with a track record of future-ready, on-time, powerful and cost-effective solutions worldwide, that can help you deliver futuristic solutions that meet your business needs.