September 15th 2015

eZ announces the availability of 5.4.5, a maintenance release available for all users of eZ Publish Platform 5.4.

5.4.5 is currently in public beta as it introduces new features, Solr search engine Bundle and new Recommendations Bundle, and as it is a beta and undergoing both internal and external testing it is not supported for use in production. 5.4.5-stable is planned to come out 1 month after the first beta, depending on feedback we get on these features.

For reporting issues, mark them as affecting "5.4.5-beta".

To be able to get access to the beta you will have to change stability flag on affected/added packages (Solr and Recommendation are optional new packages):

composer require --no-update ezsystems/ezpublish-kernel:~5.4.5@beta
composer require --no-update ezsystems/ezpublish-legacy:~5.4.5@beta
composer require --no-update ezsystems/ezplatform-solr-search-engine:~1.0.0@beta
composer require --no-update ezsystems/recommendation-bundle:~1.0.0@beta

After this has been done follow the 5.4.x Update Instructions to apply this update to your platforms, but after executing `composer update`, further actions are needed for Solr Search Engine Bundle, and Recommendation Bundle in order to correctly install them.

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

Package Details

Resolving known issues

Being this release is a beta it contains some known issues that we are working on to document, and when possible to roll out as new updated beta tags via composer update as soon as we can.

Known for both Solr and Recommendation:

Exception if Binary files in database has invalid path prefix
- Make sure ezpublish.yml configuration var_dir is configured properly, and that you specify siteaccess when indexing content for Solr via command line.
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,

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@beta	5.4.4.1
ezsystems/ezplatform-solr-search-engine	1.0.0@beta
ezsystems/recommendation-bundle	1.0.0@beta