Vendure v0.13.0: The Customer is Always Right

This release includes a host of new features and fixes relating to customer management, and in this blog post and video we’ll explore some highlights.

Customer Groups

Customer groups are a brand-new feature which allow customers to be grouped together. Groups can be both functional (e.g. allowing certain business logic to apply to members of that group), or purely informational (e.g. marking a certain set of customers with a “tag”). For example, you may have some B2B customers who should have special tax rules, or certain customers who qualify for a specific promotion.

Customer groups will be used in the future to enable powerful new possibilities in selective shipping, promotions, taxes, marketing segmentation and more.

Customer History

Customers now have a full history timeline just like orders do. Now you can see the exact date and time a customer registered and verified their email address; when they requested a password reset; when they updated an address, and more. And just like with orders, notes can also be added to the customer timeline.

The customer history gives store admins rich contextual information for each customer, improving customer service and making debugging issues with customers much more transparent.

Other Customer-related improvements

The customer’s phone number can now be viewed and edited in the customer detail screen, and customers can be deleted via the customer list. It’s important to note that the deletion of a customer is a “soft delete”, so the actual customer data is not erased from the database. In countries that are subject to the GDPR, more work is needed in order to comply with data deletion requests from customers. Right now this can be implemented as a custom plugin, and in future Vendure will have official support for this case.

Collection Slugs

One major missing feature has been the lack of slugs for collections. Slugs allow a custom url to be used to point to a collection in the storefront, enabling urls like /collection/electronics rather than /collection/5.

This release brings support from collection slugs, and the ability to look up a collection by its slug in the GraphQL APIs. Just like with product slugs, collections can define localized slugs for each supported language.

Check out our updated demo storefront to see collection slugs in action!

Other notable changes

Added support for Traditional Chinese to the Admin UI.
Added a high-level configuration guide to the docs.
Order notes can now be edited and deleted
Better control over Database logging - no more getting swamped by sql queries when attempting to debug.
When using the search query, you can now control whether to combine any facetValueIds with a logical AND or OR operator (see SearchInput docs).
Many bug fixes

Breaking changes

Since this is a pre-1.0 minor release, there are a few breaking changes to be aware of. Please see the breaking changes in the changelog for full details.

Community contributions

A huge thanks is due to the community members who directly contributed to this release:

samxchan1021 provided Traditional Chinese translations for the Admin UI
Nico Hauser contributed a fix to the core, as well as extending the ElasticSearchPlugin with the new mapQuery option
Eduardo implemented a new config option which allows you to specify the superadmin credentials.
Jakub Rybinski fixed our plugin developer guide.

Plus many more who filed bug reports, made feature requests, and shared feedback