Icecat Release Notes June 03, 2020: JSON structure changes and “nofollow” in external reviews links

JSON structure changes

Our JSON structure is updated: in the past the same tag sometimes contained an object and sometimes an empty array when there are no data for an entity, but when there are data it’s represented by an object.
In the new situation, we are using an empty object cast when there is no data. The situation with a data populated object will stay as it is right now:

Editor journal update

The editor journal is a central entity in our Icecat PIM or Vendor Central.

1. Updated logic for editor journal – we now show multiple languages (locales) per product update.

2. Product data-sheets that switched ownership will be shown in the editorial journals of all respective editors.

3. The editor journal now distinguishes between newly described product data-sheets and modified product data-sheets.

Front Office: added “nofollow” to external reviews links and improved performance

We sometimes got questions about our impact on the SEO of reviews publishers. Some fear that the icecat websites with its 60+ locale could be seen as link farming by Google. In order to avoid this, we decided to add the “nofollow” attribute for all external links that our reviews contain. In this way, Google will not consider these links while calculating a publisher’s websites page rank.

Since Icecat traffic is constantly growing, we invest a lot of time to optimize the architecture so that every page is loading fast and usability will remain on a high level. The first performance improvements are already deployed, but there are more to come, including Server-Side Rendering and internal existing architectural solutions optimization.

Coverage report fixes

– added error messages while displaying the coverage progress bar
– fixed issue with non-UTF encoding
– fixed issue with \” in ready XLS file