Mirasvit Last Updates - March 2024

March marks the beginning of spring, and it also marks new features and improvements for our Magento modules. In this article, explore the latest enhancements introduced by Mirasvit in its Magento extensions for the last month.

GPT AI Assistant & Content Generator

🔥 New feature: write brand-related text with AI

Easily include the info on your brand when the text for the store is written by the ChatGPT artificial intelligence (AI). The AI can do so with the new feature: compatibility with brand prompts.

These prompts can help you to quickly get text for the following requests:

• Brand Short Description;
• Brand Meta Description;
• Brand Meta Keywords.

🔥 Improvement: GPT-4 Turbo model support

The AI Assistant & Content Generator module works via ChatGPT artificial intelligence, which is one of the most advanced on the market. And ChatGPT developers keep enhancing its backbone — the GPT language model. Its new GPT-4 Turbo model is more capable, has an updated knowledge base and supports extended prompts up to 300 pages of text.

Now, you can use this GPT-4 Turbo model in your Magento store to generate more quality text copy for your product pages, social media, emails, and other text-related tasks.

Advanced Reports

🔥 Improvement: see product images in reports

Your reports can now be even more informative with the new Product Image column you can add to them.

Instead of guessing what is the product you see in the report by its SKU, ID, or Product Name, simply view the product image and get understanding instantly.

In case you're using the advanced column picking mode, call the Product Image column within your report from the catalog_product_entity data table. The Product Image column has the full name catalog_product_entity|image.

🔥 Improvement: ability to duplicate dashboards (Mirasvit_Dashboard)

Get an additional place for displaying your sales data summary without having to set up a dashboard from scratch.

Now you can duplicate your existing Advanced Dashboard and modify the copy according to your needs.

Automatic Related Products

🔥 Improvement: restore layout after module re-enabling with a command

It is now easy to restore related data after the Mirasvit_Related extension was disabled, and then re-enabled in your store.

In the terminal on your Magento server simply execute mirasvit:related:restore command.

Advanced Reviews

🔥 New feature: review widgets for photo gallery, all reviews, overall rating

Make your products more trustworthy by highlighting customer's photos and reviews on them on pages of your store. Use new widgets to place the customer-generated content on your homepage, and other pages of your store, making genuine customer opinions more visible.

Add such widgets as photo gallery, all reviews, and overall rating.

Blog MX

🔥 Improvement: choosing the style of URLs

The March update of the Blog MX extension has brought an option to make the URL structure of your blog more informative and SEO friendly with the long URL style template. It includes category path in addition to the post path, making navigation easier. Alternatively, you can opt for short URL style, which includes only the post path, making it easier to remember links to blog pages.

The new option can be applied to URL templates for categories, posts, authors, and tags.

🔥 Improvement: URL keys conflict validator

Blog MX will now help you to avoid the situation when two pages (post, author, category, tag) have identical URLs, which is bad for SEO. The module now displays a warning if the URL already exists.

🔥 Improvement: URL key generator improved

Now you can be sure the URLs for blog, author and ag pages are generated more optimally for SEO and Navigation. The URL generator now uses the enhanced URL validator.

🔥 Improvement: Open Graph on category pages

Make the category pages more user and SEO friendly by enabling their content representation through the Open Graph protocol.

Banner Slider

🔥 Improvement: quickly cleanup and restore layouts for banner placeholders

Easily avoid errors when disabling and re-enabling the Banner Slider extension in your store with two new commands for handling layout updates. In the terminal, apply the following commands:

• use a cleanup command mirasvit:banner:layout --cleanup before disabling the Banner Slider extension. This helps to prevent errors on the frontend when the extension was disabled.

• use a restore command mirasvit:banner:layout --restore when the extension was re-enabled. It restores the banner layout.

Magento 2 Elasticsearch

🔥 Improvement: Product Boost Rule preview functionality

The Elasticsearch extension offers a feature to put some products higher in the search output according to the rule you specify. Now you can be more confident that your in-store search boosts the position of the products you want to boost with the Product Boost Rule preview.

The Preview window shows products that fall under the newly created rule, eliminating the risk of misconfigured products.

🔥 Improvement: adjustments for the search by child products

Search by child products has become more accurate since it now takes into consideration the Store ID.

🔥 Improvement: validator improvements

Search result validator has now improved its accuracy. The search result score is calculated with enhanced algorithm.

🔥 Improvement: expand debug options for Opensearch

The Elasticsearch Debug Logger in Magento admin has become available for Opensearch engine.

🔥 Improvement: added logging for synonyms import

You can now see in your admin the data logged during the dictionary of the synonyms import, which helps to troubleshoot possible errors with the import process.

Full Page Cache Warmer

🔥 Improvement: enable cashing based on visitors actions in admin

The caching module is a guaranteed method to speed up Magento, boosting visitor satisfaction and Google search ranking. One of the powerful data sources to determine what pages should be cached are visitors' actions.

Previously, this source should have been activated during the module installation or update. However, sometimes this operation ended with error, requiring the source to be manually added into MySQL. Now, you can simply choose this source in the store's admin.

🔥 Improvement: remove pages that obtained uncacheable status more than 90 days ago

Your Magento will optimize its resource consumption and performance while simultaneously providing visitors with recently updated content by automatically deleting pages with uncacheable status.

🔥 Improvement: store label added to sitemap options in sources' configurations

Store owners with multiple store views can now more easily choose the respective sitemap as the caching source since the sitemaps now have the label of their store id.

🔥 Improvement: field validation in admin forms

This improvement ensures the integrity and safety of the data typed in the Magento admin forms. The validation checks the typed in data has no HTML tags.

Follow Up Email

🔥 New feature: integration with the AWS remote storage

The Follow Up Email extension now fully supports Magento stores deployed in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud instance. Starting from the version 2.6.0 our module has full support of AWS remote storage.

Magento 2 GDPR

🔥 New feature: cookie consent change for guest users

Make your web store more compliant with the European Union GDPR law. Under this law, all websites must explicitly disclose that user's personal data is collected. Users have to give their explicit consent on what data they allow to collect.

In any case, users must have the options to revoke their consent. The Magento 2 GDPR module now allows both registered and guest visitors without an account to change their consent. Previously, guest users had no such option.

The setting for this option guest visitor can find in the store's footer.

🔥 New feature: Google consent mode support

Google offers its commercial ads and scripts to be adjusted according to customer's privacy preferences. Now, you can implement this Google Consent mode to facilitate your customer's privacy preferences even more.

Configure the default Google consent behavior for:

• ad_user_data
• ad_personalization
• ad_storage
• analytics_storage
• personalization_storage
• functionality_storage
• security_storage

🔥 Improvement: privacy dashboard in a customer account

Your shoppers now can quickly see their privacy settings within your store though the Privacy Dashboard available in their account.

This dashboard allows to:

• Anonymize personal data;
• Delete account;
• Download personal data;
• See User's Consents;
• See and Change Cookie Consents.

🔥 Improvement: ability to select order status for anonymization

Add an additional level of anonymity for your customers. The anonymization of user personal data (first name, last name, address, date of birth) can be automatically enabled for orders with specified statuses.

🔥 Improvement: Hyva compatibility updated

Two additional modules Hyva_MirasvitGdprConsent and Hyva_MirasvitGdprCookie were added to improve GDPR module Hyva compatibility.

🔥 Improvement: Google Consent v2 snippet placed to default Magento theme's HTML head

Placing the Consent v2 template in the page header allows it to be processed at the early stage of page loading, ensuring its early execution and increasing the protection of user's data.

🔥 Improvement: ability to hide cookie bar

You may choose to disable the display of the Cookies help us deliver our services. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. Learn more message

🔥 Improvement: added translations for the cookie description on the frontend

Show the explanation why the store collects user data and stores cookies in the native language of your shoppers.

Google Analytics 4 with GTM

🔥 Improvement: track preselected product variant

An improved feature of tracking preselected product variant makes the data in your Google Analytics clearer, helping you to get better understanding of sales trends in your store.

🔥 Google Consent v2 compatibility

Improve the privacy of your visitors by making Google advertisement scripts to behave according to the user preferences.

🔥 Track user email for the conversions of customers in a guest mode (without an account)

Get additional source of information on conversions of your customers without an account by tracking their email.

Layered Navigation

🔥 Improvement: automatically scroll to page top after customer applies filters

Make your store's layered navigation even more user-friendly by adding one more bit of automation. Typicaly, when visitor sets filters to narrow down the list of products, he may be scrolled up to the page top. In this case viitor may lose the track of his position on the page.

By activating the new Scroll to top after filters applied option you save your visitors time for scrolling back to his previous position on the page, leaving them more time for shopping. The page will not scroll up automatically.

Order Management

🔥 Improvement: less computing power required when exporting Orders Grid

The Order Management has been refactored and updated with a new approach to Orders Grid export, reducing RAM consumption and processor load. For example, the process of retrieving column data was moved into a separate service. All of these improvements increase the performance of the Orders Grid export process.

Product Attachments

🔥 Improvement: more convenient configuration of how attached files are displayed

The Product Attachments module has recently been improved to make the attachments more visible by changing their sort order on category and product pages. This allows placing more important file attachments first, increasing chances that important document will be noticed by customer first. For example, you may want to display a product's user manual first, and other files related to this product can be placed after the manual.

The attachment sorting order can be changed quickly by drag and drop using mouse.

Advanced Product Feeds

🔥 Improvement: one more check to guarantee your feed will be delivered

The latest version of Advanced Product Feeds module eliminates the rare situation when your store tries to deliver the product feed file that was not actually created.

The extension now checks if the product file exists and only after this it the feed delivery process can be launched. In case the feed file is missing, the module will ask to generate the feed before delivery.

🔥 Improvement: added ability to get the "Manage Stock" attribute

The product feed can now get an important information of stock reserves for products. Include Manage Stock attribute in the product feed to get this information.

Advanced SEO Suite

🔥 New feature: SEO friendly Layered Navigation URLs

Layered Navigation in your store can become more SEO friendly with the ability to choose the URL template: long or short. The Long URL template includes the product attributes, making it easier for Google to understand your store, and improving your SEO. Alternatively, you can omit the attributes in the URLs and leave only product options and product category in the URL.

🔥 New feature: image alt and title can be configured separately

The extension can automatically insert the Alt HTML and image title attributes to all product images on product view, product list pages, and in the Google sitemap. Now the templates for these attributes can be setup independently.

🔥 Improvement: configure language locales more flexibly

To make it easier for Google to know the page has its copy in another language, a hreflang tag is used. However, in case a website has only one language variant, using this tag is an overkill, and it would be better to omit this tag.

The Advanced SEO Suite now has the option Enable Link Rel="alternate" and hreflang you can use to set how the hreflang tag will be applied to your store:

• disabled (for single language stores)
• add for every website (adds hreflang locale code automatically to every store view)
• configure manually (configure alternate languages manually for any store view)

Shipping Table Rates

🔥 Improvement: ability to sort Carrier by priority in cart and checkout

With this feature, you can control how shoppers see the list of shipping carriers in their cart and checkout. You can sort the list of carriers to display the most optimal carriers first. Set the priority level for each carrier to get them sorted in the order that suits best your business needs and your customers.

🔥 Improvement: added internal Rate name for the admin usage

Keeping track of the existing shipping rates has become easier for store staff. Shipping table rates now supports internal names for the rates.

Surcharge & Extra Fee

🔥 Improvement: Surcharge displayed in the email template and in customer account

Show more opennes to your customers by displaying additional fees they have to pay for handling and processing their orders not only during checkout. The latest version of Surcharge & Extra Fee extension now shows the surcharge payments in customers account and order emails sent to the customer.

Summary

Mirasvit team keeps updating Magento modules with new features and improvements for already existing options. This month over a dozen of modules have received new features and improvements.

For example, the GPT AI Assistant & Content Generator now supports the new GPT-4 Turbo model, enabling high-quality, AI-driven text for brand-related content. The Advanced Reports has received such significant improvements as product image integration. The Blog MX, Elasticsearch, Full Page Cache Warmer, and other modules also saw various performance and usability improvements.

These updates reflect Mirasvit's commitment to enhancing the Magento ecosystem, improving store operations, and enriching the customer experience.