Icecat Release Notes October: Anchors in Product Stories, roll-out Near Real-Time XML

These Icecat Release Notes explain the support of anchors in Product Stories, the roll-out of Near Real-Time (nRT) XML, UX tweaks in Vendor Central, and a number of miscellaneous changes and fixes. The previous Icecat release notes can be found here.

Support of anchors in Product Stories

In the newly-added HP product stories, the asset contains internal html anchors. These anchors allow switching between page sections (e.g., via a menu). Now we also support anchors in the general Product Stories format in Icecat

Near Real-time XML Roll-Out

We start to activate nRT XML locale by locale. See below our roll-out timeline.

Date when we turn on nRT	Affected locale
October 12, 2020	TE (Telugu), TA (Tamil), RU_UA (Ukrainian Russian), EN_NZ (New Zealand English), EN_ID (Indonesian English), EN_MY (Malaysia English), EN_IE (Ireland English) EN_IN (Indian English), FA (Persian), KO (Korean), EN_AE (United Arabic Emirates English) FR_CA (Canadian French), HI (Hindi), KA (Georgian), MK (Macedonian), KN (Kannada), ML (Malayalam),
October 26, 2020	HR (Croatian) TH (Thai), AR (Arabic), EN_SA (English for Saudi Arabia), EN_ZA (South Africa English), ES_AR (Argentinian Spanish), HE (Hebrew), ZH_TW (Traditional Chinese), CA (Catalan), EN_SG (Singapore English), JA (Japanese) SL (Slovenian), LT (Lithuanian), ID (Indonesian), FR_CH (Swiss French), UK (Ukrainian), DE_AT (Austrian German), BG (Bulgarian), DE_BE (Belgian German), VI (Vietnamese)
November 9, 2020	TR (Turkish), EL (Greek), LV (Latvian), NL_BE (Belgian Dutch), FR_BE (Belgian French), SK (Slovak), RO (Romanian), BR (Brazilian Portuguese), HU (Hungarian), ZH (Simplified Chinese)
November 23, 2020	PL (Polish), ES_MX (Mexican Spanish), NO (Norwegian), RU (Russian), CZ (Czech), US (US English), SR (Serbian), DE_CH (Swiss German), SV (Swedish), ET (Estonian)
November 30, 2020	EN (English), NL (Dutch), ES ( Spanish), IT (Italian), FR (French), DE (German), DK (Danish), PT (Portuguese), INT (International repository), FI (Finnish)

UX adaptations for brand editors of free Vendor Central

The increasing number of brand editors using free Vendor Central, led to a number of UX wishes to simplify the brand editor view and make it fool proof. Now, a brand editor can copy a product data-sheet, limited to brands the user is authorized for.

The functions “Do Group action” and “show batch input” and “Batch select” are all removed from the brand editor view.

Also the menu function “See tickets” is now removed from the view of a brand editor as these tickets are mainly used between Icecat editors.

Finally, the Delete a user function is also dropped. Not just for brand editors but for any normal editor.

Data-sheet download reports in CSV

In the Stats back-office, we use now strictly CSV in stead of TXT as the standard format for CSV-like statistical usage reports.

Brand feed configuration changes

We discontinue support for BRP-type images, typically from the Philips feed. From now on our scripts also remove this image type from any product gallery of any product data-sheet in our PIM back-office.

From the HP feed, we stopped to process multimedia objects as these didn’t include useful digital assets. Further, we added support of several HP accessory categories.

Related to the Signify feed regarding Philips branded lighting products, we prepare for the large scale import of multimedia objects.

Front Office: updated banners on Manufacturer service pages

We applied newly-designed banners on each page of the Manufacturer service pages. An example is here below.

Bug fixes

• Browsers considered our web-pages as not secured. Because in some cases we shared images via HTTP and not HTTPS. Now, all content is shared via HTTPS only.
• The search suggester in our front-office did not recognize certain special symbols. And since some of the brand names contain different kinds of them, we updated the suggester algorithm to take care of this.
• A preview did not appear after sharing pages via social networks. Fixed now.
• The Extract Transform & Load tool that our editors use frequently got a speed bump.