Rumba is the code name for Elastic Path Commerce 6.1.2, which was officially released to customers early last week. The development work on this release began in late April and finished in August. Dubbed a feature release, it has a bit of everything included in it.

The key focus of Rumba was rounding out the tagging framework and dynamic content functionality. The tagging framework was enhanced to include tag value types, which allow for easy definition of UI helpers for various tags, validation of tag values and localization among other things. The reusable generic condition builder underwent a major facelift, when we introduced an easy to follow UI, nested conditions and a combination of AND and OR operators, which will allow users to take their shopper segmentation to the next level. Shopper segmentation was further enhanced by the introduction of several new tagging events and corresponding tags such as cart subtotal and in store search terms. We also provided a sample GEO IP 3^rdparty integration with Quova. Through the integration with Quova, we developed several highly useful GEO IP tags such as country code tag, state/province tag, top level domain tag etc. All of these tags will make GEO targeting a very appealing prospect for our clients.

During the second half of Rumba development, we focused on usability enhancements and client requested fixes to existing functionality. We added column sorting to frequently used areas of the CM Client such as Order and Product Searches. This usability work will allow Customer Service Reps, Catalog Managers and other CM Client users to be much more efficient in their day to day tasks. We also improved the save message prompts in CM Client to include additional information about the objects being saved, which will allow CM Client users to make faster and more informed decisions.

Another area of the system that experienced a facelift is the permissions structure. Previously, everyone with access to CM Client had read permission on everything and read, update and write permissions on explicitly assigned areas of the CM Client. In 6.1.2, we've implemented a restricted view access policy, so that users who are not assigned specific activities, catalogs, stores and warehouses will not have access to them at all. Finally, the tax calculations for inclusive tax jurisdictions were improved, by addressing bugs for edge cases. As a result, taxes are now covered by extensive automated tests, which will serve as a model of how we can better automate the testing of key aspects of our platform in the future.

There were also some technical improvements. We upgraded to Solr 1.3, and we are back on a mainline release. Previously we had customized Solr and Lucene to get it to do what we wanted. The new version now provides exactly what we need, so it's going to be easier to upgrade Solr and get bug fixes in the future. Solr 1.3 brings a lot of potential: more flexible config, better performance, runtime index creation/copying and more. Also, our build scripts are now leveraging antlion to provide build avoidance. Now, if the core engine is up to date and you rebuild storefront, you will only rebuild storefront, reducing overall build time considerably.