Icecat Release Notes 121 and 122: New Locales, QR Code for Scanning Energy Labels, and Migration PHP index files started

In these Icecat Release Notes 121 and 122, we discuss new Locales, QR codes for scanning energy labels, migration to PHP index files, and the End of Life date of products in Datasheets. Please, find the previous Icecat Release Notes 120 here.

Australian Locale

We activated the new local for Australia. The new language code for Australian-English is EN_AU, and the backup language for the new locale is United Kingdom English, which means that if no values are present, by default the UK English ones are taken.

Added QR code scanning engine for Energy Labels

We added a QR code scanning engine for Energy Labels and connected it to our REST API for multimedia objects. When a user creates a new energy label via REST or our ETL (extract transform load) tool, the QR code from the picture will be automatically scanned. As a result, the energy label is recognized as new, and the data from the code will be added to the relevant field.

Migration to PHP index files

We have rewritten the generation of full, daily, on-market, nobody, and other old indexes in PHP and started connecting them to each locale, one by one. As a consequence, new index files work faster now, and we can commit to timely delivery. Furthermore, we have moved them to our current technology stack, which helps our team to improve support and development.

Rewritten image loader to React

We rewrote our image loader in React. This development improves the image loading speed for product pages on our website, and further we reduced the number of loading images in sliders, and removed double image requests.

Added End of Life date to product pages

In the Icecat Product Datasheet, the End of Life date is now live. As a result, users can see in the Front Office if a product is active or not active.

Server-Side Rendering to improve loading speed

In short, Server-Side Rendering technology is now live for our Manufacturer pages. This will helps us to improve the loading speed. To sum up, see the list below for affected pages:

• Open Icecat
• Standardization of data
• Multilingual
• Cross-sell & up-sell
• Multimedia
• Market Intelligence
• Lead generation
• PIM-as-a-Service

Right-to-left language support on Brand Rank Page

We tested and improved further our user interface on the Brand Statistics page for right-to-left languages. See the image below.

Improved matching efficiency

We had a few requests from clients regarding the working of the Matching functionality in the front office. So we fixed issues related to processing unsupported symbols and fixed a bug in the regular matching process that caused a hanging process.