Product Launch: Ibexa DXP v4.0

With the release of Ibexa DXP v4.0, we are introducing several new key features and product enhancements. The redesigned user interface (UI) will help end users save effort in their daily work, and the new Product Catalog feature is a powerful DXP-native PIM component that will help our customers manage a vast number of products distributed via various online sales channels. In addition, we have added a new price engine, renewed our online editor, and enhanced Ibexa Personalization with new capabilities. 

Ibexa DXP v4.0 is a fast track release (FTR) that marks the beginning of our releases for version 4 of Ibexa DXP. With v4.0, we have added new features of great value to our customers and end users, and this blog post provides an overview of the new features and enhancements included in this release.

Product Catalog – a powerful PIM component

The brand new Product Catalog feature centralizes the management of potentially hundreds of thousands of unique SKUs and provides greatly simplified product data management for content editors and product owners. Product Catalog is a PIM (Product Information Management) component that gives you full control of your product data and pricing, and enables you to improve the search and filter opportunities for your customers.  

You will be able to store complex product information, edit product characteristics and define product variations and product bundles that can be used to attract buyers. Custom pricing strategies can be defined to differentiate prices based on your market segments, buyers’ organization or the end-users’ individual characteristics.

The benefits of a DXP-native PIM

Many businesses deploy third-party PIM software to manage their product data and fuel their product catalogs, but the PIM market is fragmented, making it difficult to pick the tool best suited to their needs. The new Product Catalog has been developed to make our customers able to create a truly frictionless buying experience, and the redundancy of an external PIM system will save them from costs connected to integration, hosting and maintenance. As a native part of Ibexa DXP, it will enable them to create intuitive and relevant customer journeys from a single platform.

Read all about the new Product Catalog in the feature preview blog post

Ibexa’s new Product Catalog is a DXP-native PIM that enables management of hundreds of thousands of unique SKUs.

Introducing Ibexa DXP’s redesigned user interface

Ibexa DXP’s user interface (UI) has been continuously developed and enriched with new capabilities since 1999. Following the establishment of an in-house UX (user experience) team, the time was now ripe for a highly structured, deep review of the UI design to challenge the DXP’s navigation structure and overall graphic design.

A user testing panel consisting of both Ibexa DXP users and users of other systems has been key to the development of the new UI, to bring user feedback into every step of the development process by identifying key pain points with the current UI and its navigation (information architecture), helping to validate the new UI designs, and testing the new design to identify its potential UX/UI problems and suggest improvements.

Smoother navigation, more intuitive content management

The new user interface is so intuitive that existing users will get to grips with it swiftly. In addition, new users are likely to perceive the new UI so intuitive that they can do most tasks by themselves. Processes related to creation and editing of content items and products have been streamlined, unnecessary clicks have been eliminated by introducing context menus, and the graphic design provides more visual guidance by promoting key functionalities and frequently used tools.

The new graphic design affects most features and tools. The main navigation section’s background has been darkened to make tool tabs and icons stand out, and to separate the navigation section from the content area (where content is managed). The content area’s background color is kept white for many reasons, among them are contrast, text visibility, and readability. New visual elements such as redesigned icons, tabs and buttons have been introduced to make work easier for users and help user flow by reducing the number of clicks or actions they need to make to complete a task.

Explore the UI enhancements in the full preview blog post

“Old” vs. new UI design: The new UI utilizes dark backgrounds to highlight key menu elements and a brighter background on the content space for optimal visuality and contrast. The toolbar has been replaced with space saving buttons. Search is now visible in the header bar.

New capabilities to Ibexa Personalization

Recommendation of content or products from external data sources

Ibexa Personalization offers a wide variety of capabilities that enable targeted content and product recommendations. However, these capabilities have previously only been accessible to customers who store their data in Ibexa DXP’s content repository. 
With v4.0, Ibexa Personalization can recommend content and products that are stored in external systems as well, for instance PIMs or ERPs. All recommendation settings can be managed from Ibexa DXP’s interface, regardless of where the content is stored.

Our customers can also use a mixed approach without friction, storing parts of the content in Ibexa DXP’s content repository and other parts in external systems. Furthermore, Ibexa Personalization supports cross-content type recommendations, for example users who read this article (stored in Ibexa content repository) purchased these items (stored in a PIM system).

As a part of the development process, we also simplified the configuration of Ibexa Personalization’s settings by making it easier to understand and more intuitive to use.

Automated segmentation

Ibexa DXP v4.0 introduces the possibility to deliver highly targeted content or product recommendations to specific groups of users (segments) based on their interests, location or buying habits. User segment factors can be added to the tracking script, which the recommendation engine uses to compute recommendation models based on segment attributes. Our customers can track and analyze how the content is consumed by the different segments and adjust the settings when needed.

New price engine offers vast custom pricing possibilities

A significant addition to our e-commerce offering is the new price engine introduced with Ibexa DXP v4.0. This feature enables highly flexible price management directly in the DXP’s admin interface, where different customer groups are created, individual customers are assigned to the groups, and global and specific pricing rules are created and managed.  

For a B2B business, different customer groups can, for instance, be resellers, retailers, and franchises. A B2B business needs a structured and straightforward way of managing its e-commerce pricing rules for the different customer groups, in real-time and with a high degree of flexibility. Global price rules, e.g. an overall discount applying to a customer group, can easily be assigned with the new price engine. However, the pricing can be customized much further and override the global price rules, e.g. on product category or product level, enabling a degree of flexibility that caters for the most complex B2B pricing scenarios. 

The new price engine supports all currencies.

The new price engine provides a straightforward way of managing prices for different customer groups (screenshot above) and offers a high degree of flexibility by allowing global price rules to be overridden on e.g. product category or product level (screenshot below).

Lost in formatting? Never again with the new online editor

Pasting content copied from e.g. Word or Google Docs into an online editor can be an ordeal. The original formatting is often lost or causes several errors on the web page you paste the content into. Ibexa DXP v4.0 introduces our new online editor, which is based on CKEditor 5, an ultra-modern JavaScript rich text editor with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface to create links, manage images or tables. 

Ibexa’s customers, end users and partners will benefit from all the features included in CKEditor 5 when managing content in Ibexa DXP. Among them is hassle-free pasting of copied text, tables, and images from various external programs into the online editor without producing errors or losing format. 

More taxonomy options

The new taxonomy component delivered with Ibexa DXP v4.0 replaces a third-party open source bundle and introduces a new way of tagging your content items and products to improve content and product search, filtering, and navigation. 

The new taxonomy component is DXP-native to ensure better compatibility and support for the upcoming releases, which is a common challenge with open source bundles.

Taxonomy: the new user interface provides an easy way to assign relevant tags to a content item.

Rebranding of the code completed

With Ibexa DXP v4.0, all remaining mentions of “eZ Platform” or “eZ Publish” in the product code base have been rebranded to “Ibexa”. All repositories are now centralized on Ibexa Github organization.

To help our customers and integration partners to migrate to v4.0, we have also introduced the compatibility layer. This specially designed tool allows partners and integrators to migrate existing projects, including all kinds of custom extensions, in as few manual steps as possible.

Ibexa DXP v4.0 – downloads & resources

To see the complete overview of all the new features included in v4.0, please check out the release notes together with the change logs for each individual Ibexa DXP product on Github:

• Ibexa Content
• Ibexa Experience
• Ibexa Commerce