Alokai 1.7 is here — performance and quality optimization, Stripe, PayPal, Braintree payment modules, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce support

Last months release was the biggest one is VSF history. In contrast, this month we focused mostly on stabilization, optimization and improving previously introduced features without making any breaking changes.

Alokai 1.7 performance optimization

During this milestone, we did extensive work regarding Alokai performance (mostly thanks to the hard work of our new core team member — Patryk Tomczyk).

With strong usage of lazy loading, compression and by removing/replacing many heavy third-party libraries we reduced:

• app bundle by 14%
• vendor bundle by 75%
• html/css by 41%

And there are still plenty of optimizations in progress that’ll land in 1.8!

New modules

This month was also a passed test for Alokai Modules. Our partners and contributors started creating the first third-party extensions in this format and are very happy with it’s API capabilities. In just a month they managed to create a few fully working external modules!

• PayPal and Stripe modules by Develo Design (check the case study!)
• Braintree module by Daniel Coull
• Instagram module with case study by Javier Villanueva
• Web Share module

Also one of our core partners Vendic made an enhanced external checkout extension.

BigCommerce and WooCommerce integration

We are extremely happy to announce upcoming full support for two new platforms — BigCommerce and WooCommerce! You can already check out catalog-only integrations here:

• bigcommerce2vuestorefront data indexer for BigCommerce
• woocommerce2vuestorefront data indexer for WooCommerce

Stay tuned for the full-support announcement in the upcoming months or help us release it faster by contributing to the repos above ;)

There is more!

Performance wasn’t our only focus. Thanks to our monthly growing community we managed to fix a lot of minor bugs and enhance many currently existing features (e.g. we enabled color mapping in attributes).

Below you can find a full list of changes in v1.7:

Added

• Dynamic categories prefetching — @pkarw #2100
• Per-route codesplitting for SSR pages — @patzick #2068
• async/await support — @patzick #2092
• IndexedDB replacement and new caching mechanism — @pkarw #2112
• Web Share module — @filrak #2143
• Backward compatibility option for dynamic attribute loader — @pkarw #2137
• Japanese translation — @moksahero #2150
• Dutch translation — @StefGeraets #2163
• Using meta_title and meta_description fields from Magento on product/category page — @qiqqq #2158
• Color mapping feature — @pkarw #2175
• Out of the box GZIP compression and sourcemap removal in prod mode — @patzick #2186

Changed / Improved

• Invalidate output cache using POST - @Cyclonecode #2084
• NGNIX installation improvements for docs — @janmyszkier #2080
• HTML semantics improvements — @patzick #2094
• Lazy loading of non-critical third party libs and vendor optimization — @patzick @filrak @qiqqq
• Extra NL translation keys — @nlekv #2104
• Optimization for the number of attributes to be stored in Vuex store — @pkarw #1654
• Service Worker registration from any route — @patzick #2070
• Production setup docs improvements — @janmyszkier #2126
• Various changes and additions to our docs by @NataliaTepluhina
• Payment docs update — @pkarw #2135
• Added bash command for collecting i18n phrases to docs — @qbo-tech #2149
• SEO and scrolling performance fixes — @filrak #2066

Fixed

• Fix Notification.vue compiling issue on prod - @ladrua #2079
• Fix wishlist toggle bug — @shkodasv #2086
• findConfigurableChildAsync — fix checking stock for configurable child — @afirlejczyk #2097
• Fix cart synchronization — @valeriish #2106
• Fix hydration issue for lazy loaded chunks — @patzick #2115
• Clear missing fields after user logout — @sniffy1988 #2117
• Fix AMP naming ( ^^ ) for docs -@pgol #2118
• Fix Cart Configurable Item pulled from Magento — @valeriish #2119
• Fix product configuration after cart items server pull — @valeriish #2122
• Fix gallery switching when entering product — @vue-kacper #2123
• Fix multiple placing order invocation after changing payment methods — @patzick #2133
• Remove extra space after every comma for non-(multi)select product attributes — @patzick #2133
• Fix side-menu scrolling — @patzick #2140
• Fix back button not properly working from a configurable product page — @qiqqq #2151
• Fix submenu not visible on a deeper level — @patzick #2152
• vue-carousel removed from homepage - @patzick #2153 #2154
• Use localized routes for redirects to home page and account page — @grimasod #2157
• ProductLinks fixed in Related products component — @pkarw #2168
• Fix Cart Configurable Item pulled from Magento loaded as Simple — @pkarw @valeriish #2169 #2181

Depreciated

• extendStore depreciation - @filrak #2143
• ValidationError class depreciation - @filrak #2143

Alokai hackathons!

It’s awesome to see that our community is more and more active every month not only in terms of contributions but also other activities. This is why we are extremely happy to invite you all to the next two Alokai hackathons organized by one of the Polish softwarehouses and our amazing core partner BitBull which will host the first ever VS hackathon outside Poland!

Both of them will begin with free Alokai training!

#4 Alokai Hackathon — | Wroclaw, Poland

#5 Alokai Hackathon — BitBull | Milan, Italy

There is also a chance that there will be a third one in the Netherlands during the Vue.js Amsterdam conference (where you can also meet our core team, and I’ll be speaking about Web Performance) — stay tuned!

New live Alokai shops

This month we discovered two new Alokai production shops. Both of them are pretty large scale!

1. Wonect from Sigapore!
   https://wonect.com/sg/

• 2. Agregatoreat which is probably first large-scale B2B Alokai shop
  https://agregatoreat.ru/

What to expect in the next release

During next month, we will mostly focus on coding a new demo theme. The graphics are amazing and we can’t wait to show you a coded version of it running on Alokai.

Even though the core team will mostly focus on the theme, there are at least two hackathons so you can still expect a lot of improvements, enhancements and new features in upcoming releases. Moreover:

• During the hackathons along with friends from Develo Design — we plan to integrate a Payment request API which can be an option for checkout replacement in many shops.
• We will also enable seamless lazy loading of Alokai modules which should give us another big boost in bundle reduction.
• VSModules capabilities will be enhanced with the possibility to extend the webpack configuration.

Thank you

As always, I want to thank all of our contributors and partners for their hard work!

Thanks to you, we are able to ship tons of improvements each month and make Alokai much better software with every release!