Aero Commerce July Updates:
The beauty of building on a Laravel-powered e-commerce platform like Aero Commerce is the relentless pace of refinement. Over the past few weeks, the core engineering teams have been hard at work shipping a series of updates across the core ecosystem packages: aerocommerce/core, aerocommerce/admin, and aerocommerce/checkout.
Whether you are a developer wrestling with environment quirks or an administrator looking for finer control over your store, this batch of updates brings some major quality-of-life improvements. Let’s dive into the highlights of what’s new, what’s updated, and what’s been fixed!
🌟 What’s New?
1. Finer Control Over Permissions & Settings
Security and access control get a massive boost in aerocommerce/admin 1.56.0 and core 0.55.0. You can now assign Permissions to Setting Groups, giving store owners granular control over exactly who can view or modify specific backend configuration panels. Alongside this, a new SettingGroupUpdated event has been introduced, allowing developers to hook into setting changes seamlessly.
2. SEO Boosts for Manufacturers
If SEO structure matters to your store (and it always should!), you’ll appreciate the new Has Slug options added to Manufacturers. This gives you cleaner, more customizable URLs for brand-specific pages right out of the box.
3. Content Customization: Redactor Enhancements
For stores that rely heavily on rich content, the administration panel’s text editor just got a lot more flexible. Developers can now:
Add custom Redactor plugins.
Set Redactor content dynamically through events, opening the door for automated content injections or custom formatting extensions.
4. Tree Views and UI Upgrades
Navigating your content hierarchy is now much more intuitive. The Pages resource list has been updated to a tree view using a new AbstractResourceListTree component, making managing nested pages a breeze. Furthermore, the product page now boasts better client-side validation alerts and an upgraded SearchableSelectWithModal component complete with searching capabilities to streamline data entry.
5. Inventory Alerts
Never get caught off guard by sudden stockouts. aerocommerce/core 0.54.0 introduces the VariantStockBufferReached mail notification event, giving you an automated heads-up the moment a product variant hits its low-stock buffer.
🛠️ Key Improvements & Developer Fixes
Smooth Sailing on Windows OS
Cross-platform development can sometimes throw unexpected curveballs, particularly regarding symlinks. The aerocommerce/core package tackled this head-on with fixes to the php artisan aero:link command, including adding support for absolute paths when symlinking on Windows OS and maintaining backward compatibility with older Laravel versions.
Checkout & Order Tweaks
Shipping Unset Issue Resolved: An annoying bug in
aerocommerce/checkoutwhere shipping methods could inadvertently become unset has been squashed.Order Tracking & Emails: Admin views will now properly display order emails even when the order has an associated customer.
Vouchers & Filters: The Vouchers report has been fixed to utilize the voucher payment method driver accurately, and the order status admin filter has been corrected for more precise order tracking.
📦 Quick Changelog Summary
Here is a breakdown of the versions covered in these latest iterations:
aerocommerce/checkout (0.4.4): Squashed shipping method unset bugs; optimized cart updated time checks.
aerocommerce/admin (1.55.0 – 1.56.3): Introduced setting group permissions and events, bulk action null error fixes, product page UX updates (SearchableSelect component), and tree-view lists for Pages.
aerocommerce/core (0.54.0 – 0.55.3): Brought robust Windows OS symlink support, manufacturer slug options, and the critical low-stock buffer mail notification event.
Wrapping Up
These updates highlight Aero Commerce’s commitment to delivering a developer-friendly Laravel environment without sacrificing the robust UI needs of daily store administrators. If you haven’t updated your project packages recently, now is a fantastic time to run composer update and take advantage of these stability and feature enhancements!