Aimeos 2022.07 release

The latest stable release for 2022 has new features and improvements for developers. This version focuses on enhancing the experience for editors and reducing the amount of code needed for new features in Aimeos. The key changes are:

Mass editing in admin interface 

Custom theme colors in backend

Replaced Fontawesome with Bootstrap icons  

Removed factory requirement

Resizes images in media manager

More support for fractional quantities

Improved debugging

Mass Editing

A feature that can greatly simplify editors' work is batch editing item values. The Aimeos admin now allows editing multiple values for several items at once, not just single values like status. This works for non-unique basic item values. Extend list templates and add code to subparts or decorators to enable custom bulk editing.

Custom Theme Colors

Aimeos uses CSS variables for colors and values used throughout stylesheets. This allows overwriting in custom CSS to adapt the frontend to needs or branding. 

In 2022.07, variables can be customized per site and theme when multiple themes are installed. Thus, each customer/company can select their theme and colors for their needs, making Aimeos ideal for ecommerce SaaS.

New Bootstrap Icons

Aimeos previously used Fontawesome icons in frontend and backend. As new Fontawesome icons often require paid packages, it was time to switch. Fontawesome was already replaced in the 2022.04 frontend, and now also gone from the admin backend.

Instead, Aimeos uses Bootstrap icons for a cleaner, lightweight admin look and feel that supports the colored themes since 2021.

Removed Factories

Each manager, controller and client required its own factory for instantiation. This led to boilerplate since the factories were mostly identical other than names. As of 2022.07, factories are no longer required for new managers, controllers or clients.

All objects are created by the central factories:

$manager = \Aimeos\MShop::create( $context, 'product' );

$cntl = \Aimeos\Controller\Frontend::create( $context, 'catalog' );

$cntl = \Aimeos\Controller\Jobs::create( $context, $aimeos, 'media/scale' );

$client = \Aimeos\Client\Html::create( $context, 'catalog/detail' );

$admin = \Aimeos\Admin\JQAdm::create( $context, 'product' );

Developer Experience

Aimeos strives for the best developer experience. Improvements in this release:

The media manager can now directly scale images instead of the common media controller. It offers the same features but the controller will be removed next year.

Fractional product quantities have been supported since 2020.04 and now work for multi-level pricing too. This enables fine control over pricing products sold in non-integer quantities.

For debugging, non-item objects supporting decorators now have a classes() method to inspect the wrapped object and decorators. This simplifies identifying issues.