Fortunately, there are no breaking changes between 9.1 and 9.2 so upgrading does not require any changes in your Ucommerce codebase. Though, it is required for anyone currently developing on 9.0 or 9.1 to upgrade to 9.2 as there are a couple of boo-boos that will make going live very hard for you.
Bug Fixes
With Ucommerce 9.2, we have found and fixed the following bugs:
- Faceted search now supports multi-select values in your custom fields. Instead of showing as a single item, each multi-value field now generates a proper field per value. This has been reported by multiple customers.
- Some edge cases made the products disappear from the search indexes when configured as facets.
- Payment providers underwent a breaking change making them fail in 9.1.
- If you were logged in as both a frontend user and a user in the back office, Ucommerce would not display any UI.
- Prices and relations in the products app now appear for all product types.
New Features and Improvements
Beyond bug fixes, the release includes changes to the Products app, new compatibilities as well as general usability improvements.
Products App
Product Relations Editor for the Products App
The product relations are an important piece for the merchants, and the Products app now allows us to maintain product relations.
What about Reviews?
Reviews have been taken out of scope for the Products app for now as this is not a feature that has been requested by any partner or customer recently. In favor of shipping new features that bring added value to our customers, we have decided to not include this feature for now.
Compatibility
Compatibility with the latest releases is always a high priority for us why it is great that Ucommerce 9.2 includes the following compatibilities:
- 9.2 compatibility with Sitecore 9.3
- 9.2 compatibility with Sitefinity 13 as well as continuous support for Sitefinity 12 and 11.
Important Information When Upgrading to Ucommerce 9 Using Sitecore
If you are running a version 8 or below on Ucommerce for Sitecore and want to upgrade to version 9 and up, there is a couple of manual steps involved being able to install. If the installation is started without these, it will fail and leave the site in a faulty state.
Read more here: Upgrading Ucommerce to version 9
General Usability Improvements
Here is a couple of things that make the experience more delightful in the Catalogs and Products app.
- Navigating between Products app and Catalogs app will persist in the selected store so you do not have to re-select the store you were working in. If you are not running a multi-store solution, you will not feel the difference.
- Products that are not product families will no longer show the variants section with an empty list.
Dive into the specifics of V9.2 in the release notes.
Other News
Besides bug fixes, new features, and improvements, we would like to present to you a couple of other Ucommerce news.
Extensibility In the New Tech Stack
In version 9 of Ucommerce, we introduced the new apps in Ucommerce; Catalogs and Products app. We know that what is out-of-the-box is not always enough. So our A-team is currently investigating how this could be done so creating extensions for Ucommerce in the new Vue.js / Web API stack will run as smooth and delightful a developer experience as possible. No stones will be left unturned so please be patient – we promise you, it is worth the wait. For now, play around with our demo sites to see what is in the box if you are not already familiar with Ucommerce 9.
Documentation
Everyone loves hating documentation. However, we are trying to love our own documentation so that you will love it too. We are improving the tooling and the base of our documentation to make it on par with reality. We are not done yet though we have already shipped a couple of new versions so you will start seeing the improvements in the near future if not already.
Improved Training and Certification Material
With the Ucommerce 9, 9.1., and 9.2 release, we are working on creating new training material to accommodate the changes and improvements. We want to make Ucommerce as much of a joy as possible to work with and, therefore, we want to improve our training and certifications so that they are presented in the best possible way and provide you with the information you need.
To make sure that we hit the target, we kindly ask you to enlighten us on your expert knowledge about your experiences with our training and certification material. So, if you have taken any Ucommerce certifications or training sessions, then please help us help you make it more of a joy by telling us how the material can be improved. It can be anything from content to format to whatever you feel needs to be improved.
Please share your brilliant thoughts with us in the survey below:
Improve Ucommerce Training and certification material
Anything Else We Need to Know?
We always appreciate first-hand feedback on our releases, our plans, our roadmap, or anything in between. Any inquiries are more than welcome. Send a carrier pigeon, pick up the phone, send a mail, go knock on our door, or use the contact form. We promise we will be overly excited about your feedback!