November 12th 2015
eZ announces the availability of 5.4.5, a maintenance release available for all users of eZ Publish Platform 5.4. In addition to 18 bug fixes, it adds support for two features that are part of the upcoming eZ Platform release: Solr as a repository search engine, and a new integration of the Recommendation engine.
Follow the 5.4.x Update Instructions to apply this update to your platforms.
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 integration is now available, 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
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 | 5.4.4.3 |
| ezsystems/ezpublish-legacy | 5.4.5 | 5.4.4 |
| ezsystems/ezplatform-solr-search-engine | 1.0.0 | NEW |
| ezsystems/recommendation-bundle | 1.0.0 | NEW |
Updates and fixes in this release
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