Releases

The stable 2019.04 release contains some major improvements:

Improved core APIs and rewritten frontend controllers
XML importer for attributes, categories, customers, products and suppliers
Increased performance for complex queries
More SEO friendly URLs

Improved APIs

The Aimeos core already offered an easy to learn API for working with managers, items and providers. All methods are now supporting fluent interfaces if possible so method calls can be chained like:

$item = $manager->createItem()->fromArray( $map )
    ->setType( 'default' )->addPropertyItem( $propItem );

Additionally, the frontend controller API for working with the shop objects efficiently in the HTML clients and the JSON REST API has been completely overhauled. All objects contain simple, fluent methods that can be concatenated like in the core library. Implementing your own product list in the frontend is now only a matter of a few easy to understand calls:

$products = \Aimeos\Controller\Frontend::create( $context, 'product' )
   ->uses( ['text', 'price', 'media' )->category( 123 )->text( 'sneaker' )
   ->sort( 'name' )->slice( 0, 48 )->search();

This statement would retrieve the first 48 products with texts, prices and images that are in category “123” and contain the text “sneaker” sorted by their names. In Laravel, facades simplify working with the frontend controller even more:

$products = Product::uses( ['text', 'price', 'media' )->category( 123 )
   ->text( 'sneaker' )->sort( 'name' )->slice( 0, 48 )->search();

XML importer

It’s now possible to import attributes, categories, customers, products and suppliers using Aimeos XML files. They are as flexible as the Aimeos data structures so you can import all items in a document oriented way. A simple example for a product XML import file would be:

<products>
    <product ref="test-article">
       <product.type>event</product.type>
       <product.code>test-article</product.code>
       <product.label>Test event</product.label>
       <product.datestart>2000-01-01T10:00:00</product.datestart>
       <lists>
          <text><textitem>...</textitem></text>
          <price><priceitem>...</priceitem></price>
          <media><mediaitem>...</mediaitem></media>
       </lists>
    </product>
</products>

The product XML export job produces the same XML format so you can share data between different Aimeos instances too.

Performance

Aimeos has gotten faster once more. Complex queries which ask for entries that reference items from other domains or have properties of a specific value are now lightning fast in all DBMS when using the *:has and *:prop search functions. To fetch all products which reference a specific attribute use:

$search = $manager->createSearch();
$func = $search->createFunction( 'product:has', ['attribute', 'default', 123 );
$search->setConditions( $search->combine( '!=', $func, null ) );
$products = $manager->searchItems();

To get notfied about queries which take longer than one second, a monitoring similar to the MySQL slowlog is now active. Furthermore, using utf8mb4 as charset in MySQL doesn’t have a performance drawback any more so it’s now used by default. Existing setups are migrated towards this charset if possible (requires MySQL >= 5.7.8).

SEO friendly URLs

In the past, Aimeos required the product ID to be part of the URL. Due to the simplifed index for product texts which contains the product URL name and due to optimized routes, the URLs of all detail pages can now look like

https://shop.com/My_cool_product

The product name in the URL can be localized for each language of corse.

Performance improvements

Aimeos is already known as ultra fast e-commerce solution for Laravel, Symfony, SlimPHP, TYPO3 and Flow/NeosCMS even for complex requirements. This release pushes the limits teared down by Aimeos #gigacommerce further with render times of 20ms and below if content caching is enabled. Without caching, response times are exceptional too compared to other shop systems and in the 2019.01 release, we reduced that time further.

First, we denormalized tables that use types, so the type code is now stored directly instead of the type ID. This saves several database queries per request. Additionally, it’s possible to retrieve related data for e.g. products filtered by type:

$manager->searchItems( $filter, ['text', 'price', 'product' => ['suggestion'] );

This fetches related products of type “suggestion” only instead of all related products. Especially for shops with many relations, this can be a huge performance improvement if components can’t be cached.

PHP 7.3 promises another huge performance improvement and we are testing that version every time. Unfortunately, there’s a bug in PHP 7.3 with prevents production usage yet. It seems that the PHP developers over-optimized opcode caching so PHP 7.3 produces wrong results: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=77310

Simplifications for developers

One of the major goals for this Aimeos release was to simplify interfaces so the first steps for new developers are easier. As a result, creating managers, controllers and clients requires only:

$manager = \Aimeos\MShop::create( $context, 'product' ); $cntl = \Aimeos\Controller\Frontend::create( $context, 'catalog' ); $client = \Aimeos\Client\Html::create( $context, 'catalog/lists' );

Items with relations are fetched recursively now and a decorator limits the recursion depth to two levels. The allowed depth is configurable like everything else in Aimeos. This allows you to get all releated data you need at one without fetching and merging data from several calls to searchItems():

$products = $manager->searchItems( $filter, ['product', 'price', 'text] );

For bundle and selection products, the items in the result list contains the bundled and variant articles including prices, texts and related products.

Also, all newly created items have the status “enabled” by default and must be explicitly disabled if required. This saves many calls to “setStatus()” especially when implementing a new importer. The frontend controllers allow multiple category IDs for filtering so it’s possible to search for
products in multiple categories with one method call.

Code cleanups

Finally, a lot of old code has been removed due to the switch to document oriented managment of items. Especially in the index managers and the filter criteria implementation was some code left after the changes required to use ElasticSearch natively.

The 2019.x releases are the last ones that will support PHP 5 as 5.6 isn’t maintained any more since this year. You should use PHP 7 nevertheless to get the best performance.

For a full list of backward incompatible changes, please have a look at the Wiki article. BC breaking changes in 2019.01 are listed up to 2018-12-31: