Chameleon Version 6

Release Date: 13.01.2015

Chameleon Shop
Shop Standard Template
Backend / Core
Features and Interfaces

• refactoring of article lists for better performance and preparation for ESI-caching
• article management: improved usability by separating product fields into several tabs
• download products such as ebooks are processed separately from physical articles, e.g. no shipping costs, no right to exchange, only certain payment methods are available etc.
• support of vouchers with different VAT rates
• support of SEPA for payment methods
• separate management of number groups: e.g. order numbers require a specific number group, so that it is possible to differentiate orders within one ERP system
• load and stability improvements by changing database storage engines for central tables
• significant performance improvement by storing write accesses to statistical article data in a separate table
• numerous patches and improvements
   

• support of responsive images
• improved basic shop template for the display on mobile devices, and revisions to simplify expandibility (more than 150 features and fixes)
• viewport switching: it is possible to switch to the desktop version on mobile devices by clicking on a designated link
• revised price-slider logic for desktop and mobile devices
• presenter module is switched off on mobile devices which reduces loading times significantly
• upgrade of theme framework to Bootstrap 2.3.2 and recent jQuery library
• extended theme handling to layouts and modules - this allows, for example in multi-shop solutions, for targeted adjustments of the basic layout based on the template language Twig
   

Final Migration of the System Kernel to Symfony

After nearly two years of planning, designing and implementing the heart of Chameleon shines in new splendour: It is now based completely on the international renowned framework Symfony and forms the baseline for high-qualitiy and investment safe projects.

In detail this means:

• ​transformation of all Chameleon packages to Symfony bundles
• The core is now based on Symfony and is therefore compatible with Symfony bundles.
• Thus, hundreds of open source modules are available and ready for their integration into Chameleon.
• support of the Symfony validator
• implementation of a service-based architecture
• Bundles are able to insert data into header and footer via Symfony events.
   

Further Changes and Improvements

• completely revised backend: By switching to Bootstrap the user experience has been greatly improved.
• image upload: Upload is now possible directly from the data set (before exclusively through the media management).
• improved loading time and load behaviour of selection and editing tool in page templates of modules by lazy loading
• update of third party rich text editor CKEditor to a newer version and error corrections
• missing translations of the backend language English were added
• numerous text corrections in the backend
• Login-protected pages can be listed in navigations optionally. Opening such a page results in a redirect to a login page.
• completely revised update manager: The status of the update is indicated by a progress bar. Tasks to be performed by the developer after the update are collected and displayed.
• introduction of message manager services for processing module messages
• introduction of portal domain services
• improvement of autoflushing, which allows pages to be sent to a browser module by module while loading
• Independent of the development mode, emails on e.g. stage systems can be redirected to preconfigured test email addresses.
• robots.txt. can be maintained directly from the backend (if not stored statically). Therefore, it is now possible to have different robots.txt per portal.
• database updates can be run directly from the console
• support of IPV6 network addresses for all central modules
• implementation of a new test suite, greater coverage of the system with unit tests (test of individual components)
   

Security

• The backend is accessible only via SSL-encrypted HTTPS connections.
• prevention of ClickJacking by setting the X-Frame-Options header on SAMEORIGIN. Thus, HTTP-calls are blocked in the HTTPS-Backend.
   

Performance

• completely revised caching and optimised for high traffic websites
• compatibility of Chameleon with PHP5.5 which results in a significant performance improvement by applying PHP's integrated Opcode cache
• better compression of CSS- and Javascript resource files
• experimental support of HHVM as of Doctrine/DBAL 2.5
• revised session handling: no write operation is performed when data remains unchanged, which leads to an increase in speed of page delivery
• significant improvement of database performance of core components
• reduction of database accesses when generating thumbnails
• load due to search robots is taken off the system by setting noindex/nofollow header with AJAX calls and JSON-Output
• optimised error handling by supporting log type depended destination storages such as database, files, log server via the component Monolog
• major performance improvement by rebuilding the page tree on a nested set
• reducing the size of the database by removing virtual database fields that do not store data themselves (n-to-n and 1-to-n field types)
• performance improvement by preloading of modules and pages in the cache and runtime caching