Deployment Day: Version 1.6.4 is all about performance and themes

Posted by SolidShops on July 14, 2014 at 09:32 PM

We’ve just upgraded all stores to the latest version of the SolidShops e-commerce CMS. This is a maintenance release with a few improvements, based on the feedback we’ve received.

Performance improvements up to 60%:

From the first SolidShops code written a few years ago until this release, we always had performance in mind but we never implemented any kind of caching since none of our customers mentioned it during our surveys.

Altough we have made each change with a lot of caution, a lot of new features have been introduced that slowly reduced the loading times of SolidShops over the last few years. So we took a sprint to optimize the SolidShops core.

If you’re running a small store with a rather simple theme, your average response time will be +-30% faster. Stores with a lot of product variants and complex themes will benefit most of our improvements. In some corner cases we improved the response time up to 60% but generally your store will have an improvement of 40-50%.

The performance during login and while  saving a product has also been improved since we moved some processing logic to background tasks.

Manage your themes on git and import them from a zip package:

We moved all the themes from our theme store to Git(Bitbucket).  If you install a theme from our theme store, the latest version will be downloaded from Git.

We also created an import tool so you can easily manage your own themes on git and import them into your SolidShops account.

Since all of our themes are on Git,  you can fork these themes to your own (private) repository and manage theme from here. This can be very handy if you want to create a base theme for multiple stores or if you want to use some tools like grunt,sass etc. Offcourse we don’t mind if you create a pull request for the things you improved 😉

You could also create a custom ZIP package from your theme but we really suggest taking a look at git. It will save you a lot of time!

Theme specific assets:

store assets

Until this release, you had to upload all the assets(js libs, theme images,…) with our store’s assets manager. This was quite confusing if you were working with different themes since these files are stored on a shop level. If you had different themes (for instance your store and a facebook theme), you had to seperate these assets by creating a folder for each theme individually. You could(and still can) link to such an asset in your theme with the following variable: {{solid.assets_url}}. These type of assets should be used to link to PDF documents etc.

theme assets

From now, on you will have a separate folder that belongs to your theme. Since this folder is part of your theme, it is also managed in git.  You can link to these static theme files with the {{solid.files_url}} variable.

Bugfixes:

• Variant availability could not be changed when you tracked “stock level for each variant combination”
• We added some extra translations to the checkout page
• During checkout, we did not send the address2 field to some payment providers.
• We switched to a transactional email provider to handle our outgoing emails. In some rare cases our order confirmation mails where marked as spam by some email providers(this only happened sometimes when the From address did not exist)
• We added a 404 http header when an unpublished product was requested
• We return an empty favicon.ico when you didn’t provide a favicon in your theme. This will prevent that browsers receive a 404 status code and  they can cache this favicon which will prevent useless additional requests.

Enjoy the updates everyone and let us know if you have an idea that can improve our application and our service to you. We’d love to know!