Community Monthly Update - August 2023

parul_sinha · ‎08-25-2023

Hello all!

Welcome to the Community Monthly Update for August. This edition has the updates from both July and August months.

Adobe Commerce announces 2024 Release Calendar

Adobe is proud to announce our 2024 Adobe Commerce release calendar. We are continuing our efforts to provide better support for mission critical customer needs, while reducing total cost of ownership by minimizing the frequency and complexity of our releases. To make releases more predictable in our 2023 release strategy, we expanded the support window, provide more security updates, and accelerate innovation adoption. In 2024, we are expanding improvements for our customers. To help summarize the changes, we look at the 2023 and 2024 strategy to determine what is staying the same and what is changing.

What stays the same?

Core patch releases focused on security, performance improvements, GraphQL coverage, and high severity bugs fixes.

New features are released as independent SaaS services.
1 full core patch release in April 2024 – version 2.4.7 – with an expanded 3-year support window.
Providing new ways to integrate, customize, and deploy new features without making changes to the core code.

What changes?

Increasing to five security-only patch releases for all currently supported Adobe Commerce versions to keep your business secure and compliant.
We will remove our two-week pre-release period to provide earlier access to the newest version of the platform through beta releases up to six months in advance.

Incorporating these strategy changes, our 2024 release schedule includes five releases:

February 13, 2024	Feature Release Security-only patch releases for 2.4.6, 2.4.5, 2.4.4
April 9, 2024	Feature Release 2.4.7 patch release Security-only patch releases for 2.4.6, 2.4.5, 2.4.4
June 11, 2024	Feature Release Security-only patch releases for 2.4.7, 2.4.6, 2.4.5, 2.4.4
August 13, 2024	Feature Release Security-only patch releases for 2.4.7, 2.4.6, 2.4.5, 2.4.4
October 8, 2024	Feature Release Beta version patch release for 2.4.8 Security-only patch releases for 2.4.7, 2.4.6, 2.4.5, 2.4.4

We hope you can use this schedule in your annual planning cycles to better prepare and allocate resources around these windows. In addition to release schedule updates, this announcement comes along with new Adobe Commerce security-only patches for all versions with support or extended support.

Security-only patches:

2.4.6-p2

2.4.5-p4
2.4.4-p5

Extended Support security-only fixes:

2.4.3-p3-ext4
2.4.2-p2-ext4
2.4.1-p1-ext4
2.4.0-p1-ext4
2.3.7-p4-ext4

Check out our updated strategy and lifecyle policy today.

Adobe Commerce releases August Features and Security Updates

Note: Not all services and extensions are available for Magento Open Source.

New Adobe Commerce Extension - AR Viewer

We are also excited to announce a new feature, previously presented at our Sneaks Sessions at Adobe Summit, AR Viewer. This extension allows shoppers to experience augmented reality shopping through their mobile device by scanning a QR code. Merchants just need to upload 3D models of their product to render the augmented reality experience. The AR Viewer extension is now available on the Adobe Commerce Marketplace.

Adobe Commerce Services Updates

This release also includes several updates to our SaaS-based Commerce Services. Improvements have been made for Catalog Service and Product Recommendations.

Product Recommendations, powered by Adobe Sensei

Product Recommendations has improved the developer experience with two new enhancements:

Product Recommendations is joining our other SaaS services to have full GraphQL API support. Developers can now query Product Recommendations, Live Search, and Catalog Service through a single-service GraphQL API. This also improves Product Recommendations support for any front-end (VUE, tailwind, mobile native app) and enables merchants with custom and headless implementations to append additional catalog data to recommendation units (e.g., custom attributes, product descriptions, configurable options).
Product Recommendations is also receiving 10x increase in indexation speed to seamlessly handle large catalogs with frequent catalog changes (e.g., pricing changes). Instead of scheduling indexing periods, merchants will experience real-time catalog indexing up to 10,000 catalog updates per second.

Catalog Service

Related Products (cross-sell and up-sell) images and data are now included in the Catalog Service API. This decreases the time it takes for all catalog related data to be displayed in a Product Detail Page (PDP).

Security-only Releases

See the release the security bulletin for more information on the security-only patches for the August 2023 release. We strongly recommend that users install security updates as soon as they are available.

Newly Released Adobe Blog Posts from the Commerce Content Creators Program

Over the past few weeks, we released a set of Adobe Blog posts about the latest in Adobe Commerce:

Community Prioritization Process for Magento Open Source

The Magento Open Source Community Prioritization Process initiative empowers the community to influence the Magento Open Source roadmap and code base by upvoting the pull requests that brings most value to them. We then pick the most up voted PRs (Pull Requests) to work on and add them to the community dashboard with a purple label - “Project: Community Picked.” We added another 10 PRs this month for processing based on the votes from the community.

We picked up a fresh batch of 15 pull requests on Aug 16. We publish a monthly update on pull requests picked under this process. The progress update for this month will be out next week.

Please check the real time status of all the pull requests added under this process on the dashboard.

If you missed our earlier updates on community prioritization process, please visit the DevBlog.

Don't miss your chance to influence Adobe's roadmap for Magento Open Source.

Payment Services for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source

Payment Services for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source provides merchants with the peace of mind that they will be able to collect payment for all their orders in the way that shoppers want to pay. Best of all, configuration and customization is done mainly from Admin so changing payment methods and customizing location and look and feel doesn't require a cumbersome development and deployment process.

Now, Payment Services is bundled with the latest beta versions of Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source. This allows merchants to avoid installing the extension and rather, start onboarding and configuring right from Admin. Look for the link in the payment configuration options in Admin. In addition, we listened to merchants and have added more transparency for transactions that are declined. This additional information gives merchants visibility on why an order has been declined with the opportunity to save it and capture the revenue. This is being actively rolled out to all merchants on Payment Services.

As always, if you have questions, need more information, or feedback for us, please reach out to Harrison Loveall (Sales), hloveall@adobe.com or Ritesh Somani (Product), rsomani@adobe.com for assistance.

SaaS catalog data ingestion

With this new enhancement, we are allowing customers to connect their systems (i.e PIM,ERP, etc) and send their catalog information and images directly to the Adobe Commerce Catalog Service. The main benefit of this new process is the time saved by bypassing the Adobe Commerce PHP catalog. All information, except for the minimal required to track and process an order (like SKU information), can now be directly sent to Catalog Service, which then takes charge of retrieving and displaying all this data on any catalog or product related page on the website.

At this time this feature is in beta and its access will be limited. We ask customers and partners who may be interested in testing this new feature to check our documentation and contact the PM - Sandra Gonzalez Mangana - sagonzal@adobe.com to discuss next steps and get access.

Community Engineering Hangout

Community Engineering Hangout is a public event aimed to share the latest platform updates, gather feedback and spread technical knowledge with the Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source Community.

Please visit https://developer.adobe.com/open/magento/calendar to get the dial-in details, check the upcoming Hangout schedule, and watch the recordings of our earlier sessions.

Reach out to us if you would like to speak at one of these sessions.

Upcoming Events

Meet Magento NYC

Oct 10-11, 2023

Be a part of this iconic two day event on October 10 & 11 in the heart of New York City. For more details, check here.

Meet Magento Florida

Jan 31-Feb 1, 2024

Meet Magento Florida is planned to be a global event focused on bringing together the Adobe Commerce community; including merchants, industry leaders, technology partners, experienced developers, retailers, and service providers, as well as acclaimed Magento and Adobe Commerce professionals. For more details, check here.

See you next month,
Parul Sinha

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