In Icecat Release 235, we delivered a broad range of performance, infrastructure, and usability improvements across multiple platforms. Through targeted updates in search optimization, deployment standardization, account management, and infrastructure modernization, we continue strengthening the foundation that supports Icecat’s global product content ecosystem. For additional details, please refer to the previous Icecat Release Notes.
During this sprint, we focused on enhancing the Icecat.biz search performance, reliability, and user experience through essential Elasticsearch maintenance and UI simplification.
To ensure the long-term scalability and performance of our search platform, the Icecat team performed a full Elasticsearch re-collection. This process required a short pause in adding new products to the search index and included:
This activity helped us to:
This maintenance activity strengthened the overall stability, response time, and scalability of Icecat search infrastructure.
In parallel, we refined the Icecat.biz search interface by removing temporarily unsupported price-related functionality, ensuring that users only see up-to-date and relevant features.
Removed elements include:
These adjustments improve clarity and usability, offering a cleaner and more informative product overview.
Additionally, the product toggle feature on product cards was removed. This decision eliminates a confusing and rarely used control, simplifying user interaction and making the search results more intuitive and consistent.
In this sprint, we focused on improving both the visual presentation of Model Content Protocol (MCP) on Icecat.biz and the technical stability of the deployment pipeline. These updates enhance user experience and ensure consistent delivery of MCP services across environments.
On the Icecat.biz homepage, the AI-generated MCP banner was replaced with a new, designer-created version. The change was necessary due to the low visual quality and inconsistency of the previous AI-generated banner.
The new banner reflects Icecat’s professional visual identity, and creates a stronger first impression for visitors and partners interacting with Icecat.biz.
In parallel, the team implemented a standardized deployment process for MCP. This improvement introduces a unified, documented, and automated deployment approach across all our environments ensuring predictable, traceable, and efficient releases.
This standardization significantly strengthens our operational stability and scalability of MCP infrastructure, supporting future development and easier maintenance.
In this sprint we had account management optimization, taxonomy maintenance, and data cleanup activities to improve operational efficiency, ensure accurate access control, and optimize system resources across Icecat platforms.
To maintain a secure and efficient user environment, the Icecat team conducted a full audit of user access rights across internal and partner systems.
Key actions:
These activities strengthen our data integrity, security compliance, and administrative clarity across all user accounts.
The External Taxonomy used for specifications organization was updated to align with new requirements of our channel partner. This ensures that all specifications mapping operations and data flow to the partner system remain accurate and consistent.
Also, this sprint was dedicated to improving the Icecat ecosystem’s performance, reliability, and maintainability through a series of key infrastructure upgrades, codebase improvements, and monitoring enhancements. Together, these updates strengthen the technical foundation of Icecat platforms and support faster, more stable development and operations.
This upgrade delivers better performance, stability, and security for Icecat front-end applications. The new version provides optimized rendering, improved caching, and faster builds, enhancing both developer productivity and user experience.
Internal tools and validation checks were improved to help developers write cleaner, more reliable, and maintainable code. These changes reduce the likelihood of future bugs, speed up feature delivery, and ensure consistent coding standards across teams.
Product gallery direct links are now handled through PHP instead of Perl. This migration results in significantly faster image retrieval and simplifies future maintenance.
A new validation layer ensures that product codes are standardized and free from invalid characters or emojis during:
This validation improves data quality, system consistency, and partner integration accuracy.
New monitoring dashboards and metrics visualization tools make it easier to detect issues early, analyze performance trends, and maintain stable operations across platforms.
The Studio platform received multiple infrastructure enhancements focused on stability and scalability:
A new server was installed and fully configured, including integration of the Ceph monitoring service.
This enhancement improves storage reliability, scalability, and performance monitoring, ensuring smoother file operations and faster response under high load.The updates introduced in Release 235 collectively improve the efficiency, resilience, and quality of Icecat’s platforms. From cleaner data and more responsive search experiences to stronger infrastructure and consistent deployment standards, these enhancements reinforce our long-term commitment to performance excellence, data reliability, and a seamless user experience for all Icecat partners and users worldwide.
Read further: Icecat, e-commerce, ecommerce, Icecat, optimization, release notes
