Product Launch: Introducing Ibexa DXP 3.2

We are truly delighted to share the news that today Ibexa is releasing new products to address the business challenges of the B2B digital transformation including improvements for search, site factory and digital asset management. 

New name, new products and new pricing

At Ibexa, we have seen the evolution of the B2B market and at even a greater pace now with the global pandemic. Customers have come to expect the same frictionless experience they have when they shop on B2C websites. B2B companies need to adapt, digitalize their sales channels and diversify their way to reach end customers. For this, they need a flexible solution with which they can integrate progressively and connect with other external services.

 So, to address these needs and offer more flexibility to our customers, we are introducing:

And, because we believe that personalization is important for a DXP, our recommendation service is available for all Ibexa customers.

We also have a new pricing and different tiers for those new products.  

New design for the administration interface

With new products and a new brand introduced earlier this year, it was time for our administration interface to be aligned with Ibexa brand. We have completely redesigned the administration interface with the following goals: make it more aligned with Ibexa, cleaner, lighter and slicker.

We know editors form habits when creating content. Therefore we did not want to break the user and editorial experience. However, we took this opportunity to optimize some elements such as the content item view. It’s now more compact and users do not need to scroll much to see all fields and associated data. It’s also faster to access the sub-items list at the bottom of the page.

The sub-items list is also a component that we have improved. The first column with content item name is sticky. Users can horizontally scroll to access more data without missing the name of the object making them sure of which item they’re looking at.

DAM Connector Framework

Digital Asset Management is one of the elements we see a lot in our customers’ infrastructures. We want to enable our partners to easily integrate and connect Ibexa DXP with these external solutions or third party services. Also, we  know that it will be impossible for us or for our partners to create a connector for every DAM solution on the market.  
Therefore, we decided to create an additional component for Ibexa DXP: DAM Connector Framework. It adds core capabilities and extension points to integrate with any DAM.

Read the full feature preview blog of DAM Connector Framework →

Search and Aggregation API

Search is always a key element of a website, especially with a large product catalog. Users expect options to filter search results in order to quickly find products. We also have listened to our community of users and developers who requested more supported facets.

Developers expect tools to optimize search results. Sometimes, complex content architecture and content model make difficult to return the right results. We are introducing a new API: Aggregation API. As a developer, you can now aggregate different facets for search queries.

Read the full feature preview blog of Aggregation API →

Finally, we have good news for customers using Elasticsearch: the product catalog can now be indexed in Elasticsearch.

Segments and Segmentation API

As explained by Roland Benedetti in Personalization Does Not Have to Be that Complex, website managers can configure their websites and provide explicit recommendations. In his blog post, Roland uses a simple taxonomy to match user and content to display.

With this new version, we decided to go to the next level and provide a simple way to segment users with Segmentation API.  

In the Admin Panel, you will find a new entry “Segments”. By clicking on “+”, you will be able to create a segment group and multiple segments.

Once created, you can use those segments in Page Builder with our new block: “Targeting”. After dragging and dropping this block, you will be able to associate a segment with a content item. Simple as that.

Site Factory

Since the first release of Site Factory in March 2020, we continue to improve this feature with every release. This release is no exception.  

First, we have some improvements for the overall usability. The list of sites gets a new design: clearer and more compact and also includes pagination. In addition we have introduced a “bulk delete” option. This will be very useful for developers and website managers who want to clean up quickly deactivated websites.

We also have listened to our customers using Site Factory with multi-language sites. It’s now possible to combine the domain name and a path for a public site. For instance, you can create acme.maison.com/fr and acme.maison.com/de if you would like to create a site with Site Factory in French and German.

Autosave

For editors, losing the last changes they made is painful. To reduce the risk, Ibexa DXP has now an autosave option. This option is activated by default. Each user can change and customize this feature directly in the user preferences: activate or deactivate autosave and the interval between every save.
What do you have to do? Just start editing, Ibexa DXP will take care of saving your content.

Content Calendar

When you are publishing or hiding content in the future, editors like to have an overview of all the events on a single interface. Ibexa DXP has a calendar view for this purpose. With this new version, editors will be happy to see events from landing page blocks.

Authentication with JWT

For all headless projects and for obvious security reasons, you need to authenticate in order execute some queries. In Ibexa DXP 3.2, we are adding a new way to authenticate: JSON Web Token (JWT). This unique generated token is used for every single request.

To activate it, it requires few lines of configuration and it’s available for both REST and GraphQL.

Read more about JWT in the release blog post →

Duplicating Content Types

When you are setting up a new instance or a new project, there are some time-consuming operations. Creating content types is one of them. You can use script to automate the process but for some cases having a user interface is better.  

Thanks to Mario Blazek from Netgen, website administrators can now duplicate a content type directly in the administration interface.

To do so, go to the Content Type table in admin panel and click on the copy button.

Rendering content

In every release, we improve the developer experience. For Ibexa DXP v3.2, developers and integrators will be happy to learn that they have simple ways to render content. 

We have 3 new twig helpers: ez_render, ez_render_content and ez_render_location.

ez_render is compatible with location and content. Here is an example how to use it:

    {{ ez_render(content) }}

    {{ ez_render(location) }}

By default, the system will use the embed view. But don’t worry you can also change the view by passing a parameter like this

    {{ ez_render(location, {viewType: "line"}) }}

What’s next

Segmentation API allow editors to implement explicit personalization. With Ibexa DXP, marketers can also use implicit personalization with our recommendation engine. Over the past few months we have improved our recommendation APIs. The next version will include interfaces to manage your recommendation models and scenarios but also check the performances or the recommendations on a unified dashboard.

We are also happy to announce that our next version, we include a simple image editor. Editors will be able to crop, resize and define the focal point for images.

Ibexa DXP v3.3 will be our Long-Term Support version: we will continue to stabilize this version with longer certification phase. 

Ibexa DXP v3.2 downloads & resources 

To see the complete overview of all the new features included in v3.1 for both the Open Source and Enterprise editions, please check out the release notes together with the change-logs on Github:

• Open Source Edition change-log
• Enterprise Edition change-log
• E-commerce Change-log

Download v3.2

• Existing customers: download via their support portal  
• Ibexa partners: download a trial instance via your partner portal login
• Via composer update
• From Ibexa Cloud

We Love Your feedback 

We're passionate about building products that help your digital business grow. Do you have a great idea for a feature that should be added to Ibexa DXP? Or just want to give us some feedback on a current feature?

Head to our Product Roadmap page to submit your request.