Pimcore 6: Digital Experience Management Rethought
We proudly announce the latest version of the most user-friendly digital experience platform today. It runs faster and smoother, seamlessly connecting MDM/PIM, DAM, WCM, and digital commerce. In addition to a revolutionary new user interface, our squads of engineers added massive amounts of new features to the product. With the help of more than 200 community members, they cleaned out Pimcore's engine compartment. This gave them the possibility to upgrade Pimcore to the leading PHP framework engine today, the Symfony Framework 4. This framework has more than 3.000 contributors, 600.000 developers, and 50 million monthly downloads. The new engine makes Pimcore the ultimately predominant platform for enterprises looking to leverage open source technology and take on technology leadership in their industry. Full backward compatibility is ensured - making updating to the latest version a simple task. Grab it now or learn more below. As usual, a complete list of changes is available on GitHub.
What are the feature highlights?
New User Interface: Fantastic Admin and Editor Experience
The completely revised user interface provides a staggering editing experience for admin users. Working with millions of product data records or managing thousands of websites becomes a more fantastic experience than ever. The look and feel and clarity have been vastly improved by removing a lot of clutter.
Editors can also now use the full range of UTF-8 characters for URLs and names of documents, apart from digital assets and data objects. This is especially helpful for non-latin language installations and improves Pimcore's compatibility in China and logographic languages across the globe.
In the 'data objects' we have improved the compatibility with complex MDM/PIM use cases by adding support for adjusting tab positions. 'Tab panels' and 'localized fields' can now be configured to be displayed on the top, bottom, left or right. This makes vertical tabbing possible.
Latest Open Source Technology for the best Developer Experience
Developers will especially appreciate the cleaned up source code and removed code clutter. The support of the Symfony 4 Framework enables them to use many new features of Symfony 4 in Pimcore projects. Symfony 4 is an improved and lighter version of Symfony 3 without obsolete and unnecessary features/plugins. It is a micro-framework, so it allows developers to enable only what they need. The idea behind is to improve the performance of your application and to become more scalable for different project sizes. You want to build a small API or a big web application, you can use Symfony 4. It is currently the fastest PHP framework.
Pimcore Data Hub for Content-As-A-Service
Released just a few weeks ago, we are adding new features every day. Pimcore Data Hub is already tightly integrated into Pimcore 6. The revolutionary tool provides a central graphical user interface (GUI) to transform and prepare data for input and output channels.
It makes Pimcore compatible with the query language GraphQL, providing easier connectivity with Content-as-a-Service (CAAS) frontends such as React, Vue, and PWAs. Experience how fast transformations of data for output channels such as mobile apps can be performed.
Faster Mass Data Record Editing in PIM
Data objects in Pimcore manage structured data of customers, products, employees, inventory, suppliers and more. The object grid is a powerful feature because it provides a good overview when mass editing data records.
We made the column configuration even more flexible by adding multiple new features. They include operators for transforming data, saving & sharing configurations, using custom views for CSV imports and many more.
True Content Commerce with Personalization
Pimcore 6 provides you with the full platform package, including the most user-friendly setup of personalization in any experience platform in the market. Its native combination of enterprise-grade web content management with its microservices-based digital commerce framework makes it the favorite choice for marketing-driven IT initiatives.
The behavioral targeting engine has matured and tracks user behavior now fully on the server-side instead of the browser side. It also is fully integrated with Pimcore's free customer data platform (CDP) and allows you to use segmented customer data for live personalization of web and commerce content.
Pimcore Academy for Faster Developer Learning
Your one-stop destination to knowing Pimcore. Pimcore Academy is designed to give you an overview of Pimcore capabilities and a clear roadmap of how to build unique solutions. This training platform offers on-demand video courses covering all Pimcore topics – from data management to experience management. We strive to help you improve your overall software development capabilities whilst simplifying and accelerating the process of building applications with Pimcore. Taking training to the next level, Pimcore Academy can help you explore and discover various backend capabilities. From code samples and personalized exams to tutorials and detailed content, get ready to take a deep dive into the open source universe.
Get started with Pimcore Academy now.
How much effort goes in the update?
You can update easily and fast. The new version makes some functions from Pimcore 5 deprecated. The effort for the update mainly depends on how many deprecated functions you are using. A great fact which will make developers happy: we have included a fail-safe option for the update. Everything that runs in Pimcore 5.8 without deprecation warnings also runs without problems in Pimcore 6. You can make Pimcore 5 ready for Pimcore 6 by updating to 5.8 and if no deprecation messages are coming, you can smoothly upgrade to 6 (please make sure to also check for comments in the code - not all functions throw a warning, but all were annotated accordingly). If you experience any problems during the upgrade, just create an issue on GitHub or post to our community forums. We'll take care of it immediately.
If no deprecated functions are used, the update will not be a big deal. Just make changes to composer.json, and hit composer update ... And you should be done.
For a complete list of removed methods and breaking changes, please have look at the upgrade notes in our developer documentation.
Pimcore 5 supported by community and LTS
Pimcore 5 goes into a security-fixes-only status with the release of Pimcore 6. There will be no new features. Of course, bugfixes will be performed in critical cases, and safety-relevant patches will be available for the next 6 months. After this time we will provide paid long-term-support via our LTS service offering (details will be shortly announced).
Preview Pimcore 6 in public demo now
You can test the new version by yourself in our public demos. To log in, please use the following credentials:
Username: admin
Password: demo
The ensemble and thank you words
This release was led by Bernhard Rusch, with the help of these fine people. There are 201 contributors with props to the Pimcore project so far. In addition to the new features mentioned above, there have also been many improvements and fixes which are mainly relevant for developers. As always, you can find the full overview directly on GitHub. There you can also follow our daily development and release cycles in real-time and provide your feedback. We look forward to your feedback. Writing quality Pimcore code requires a lot of beer drinking. Therefore from now on, all releases will be named after beer varieties. Version 6 is named "Ale". Cheers!
Get started 😊 & download Pimcore, the first and only open source digital experience platform for enterprises, for free!
