September 15th 2015
eZ announces the availability of 5.4.5, a maintenance release available for all users of eZ Publish Platform 5.4.
Beta
5.4.5 is currently in public beta as it introduces new features, Solr search engine Bundle and new Recommendations Bundle, and as it is a beta and undergoing both internal and external testing it is not supported for use in production. 5.4.5-stable is planned to come out 1 month after the first beta, depending on feedback we get on these features.
For reporting issues, mark them as affecting "5.4.5-beta".
Installing the beta
To be able to get access to the beta you will have to change stability flag on affected/added packages (Solr and Recommendation are optional new packages):
After this has been done follow the 5.4.x Update Instructions to apply this update to your platforms, but after executing `composer update`, further actions are needed for Solr Search Engine Bundle, and Recommendation Bundle in order to correctly install them.
Highlights: New Features
This maintenance release introduces two new eZ Platform features to 5.4.x: Solr Search Engine Bundle and Recommendations Bundle, besides this there are several maintenance issues fixed as listed below both coming from support issues and pull requests from community.
Improved Search engine powered by Solr
New in 5.4.5, and part of the upcoming eZ Platform release this fall, is support for running API Search queries on top of Solr instead of SQL based search engine (specifically "Legacy" search/storage engine). As Search is essentially powering all Search and Querying ("fetch") operations in Platform stack (aka 5.x/Symfony stack), this specifically means you can expect much more stable performance from your searches and your system*, and much better possibility to scale out for your search needs using Solr.
'* See 5.x Architecture diagram for further information about how persistence load operations are cached by Persistence Cache, and Search queries now are delegated to Solr, meaning database is less affected by system load to mainly deal with content updates.
Further reading: Installation documentation for Solr Search Engine, developer info and source code in our Solr Search Engine Bundle repository, and further resources on Apache Solr.
Improved Recommendations integration
A new Recommendation Bundle has been made, completely changing how the service is done. Recommendations are now served directly from the Recommendations service, avoiding cache and load problems on your server that was a problem with the previous ezreco extension. Tracking has similarly been improved to track directly to Recommendations service, and aligns with how tracking is done with other solutions like Google Analytics.
This first iteration of Recommendation Bundle focuses on personal content recommendations with tracking of user traffic, tracking of user actions like shopping behaviour is possible using our Recommendations Service API.
Limitation: Recommendation Bundle currently requires Symfony 2.6 or greater so is limited to eZ Publish Platform 5.4.3+ and eZ Platform/Studio 15.07+. We plan to reduce this requirement to Symfony 2.3 so the bundle can be used with any version of eZ Publish Platform 5.1+.
Further reading: Documentation on our Recommendation Service, developer documentation and source code in our Recommendation Bundle repository.
Package Details
Resolving known issues
Being this release is a beta it contains some known issues that we are working on to document, and when possible to roll out as new updated beta tags via composer update as soon as we can.
Known for both Solr and Recommendation:
- Exception if Binary files in database has invalid path prefix
- Make sure
ezpublish.ymlconfigurationvar_diris configured properly, and that you specify siteaccess when indexing content for Solr via command line.
- Make sure
- Exception on unsupported Field Types
- Make sure to configure all FieldTypes (datatypes) in your installation as NullType
- Content not immediately available
- Solr Search Engine Bundle is on purpose not committing changes on Repository updates, but letting you control this using Solr configuration.
Adjust Solr autoSoftCommit to control this. - For Recommendation service same is the true,
- Solr Search Engine Bundle is on purpose not committing changes on Repository updates, but letting you control this using Solr configuration.
If you still have problems, pop into our Slack channel at https://ezcommunity.slack.com/messages/ezplatform-use/ to discuss.
Package updates
Here are the ezsystems packages that have received an update as part of this release:
| package | version | prior version |
|---|---|---|
| ezsystems/ezpublish-kernel | 5.4.5@beta | 5.4.4.1 |
| ezsystems/ezplatform-solr-search-engine | 1.0.0@beta | NEW |
| ezsystems/recommendation-bundle | 1.0.0@beta | NEW |
Updates and fixes in this release
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2 Comments
Harald Tollefsen
Regarding "5.4.5 is currently in public beta as it introduces new features":
Will 5.4.4 upgrades be upgraded to 5.4.5 when running composer update ezsystems/ezpublish-kernel, or just to 5.4.4.1? If so, how can be prevent upgrade to 5.4.5 for the month its beta?
André Rømcke
By default this should not be a problem. Meaning as long as your requirements and minimum stability flag in composer.json is not specifying a unstable version, you are fine. We have been tagging rc and beta tags for internal testing all the way back since 5.3.0, and these have been publicly avaiable for anyone that wants to test, only difference now is that we communicate on it as this release deserves some more widespread testing. Specifically we are looking for feedback on how Solr is performing compared to SQL for custom installations, and if RecommendationsBundle is covering the most important use cases.
You can read more about Composer package versions and stability here:
https://getcomposer.org/doc/01-basic-usage.md#package-versions
https://igor.io/2013/02/07/composer-stability-flags.html