Dev News // August 2020

Every few months our CTO Georg Sorst takes some time out of his busy schedule to show you some of the new features and technologies that our Development teams are currently working on or have released. Enjoy!

Filter Configuration

Our new Customer Backend now comes with a brand new filter configuration. With the filter configuration you can easily configure the look and feel of the search and category result filters. You can

• Order filters to configure which filter should be displayed first, second and so on

• Change the configuration of individual filters, such as the display name or filter type

• Undo accidental changes

• Disable or enable filters with a single click

Enhancements for Category Navigation

Another big focus was on improving the possibilities of what you can do with Findologic in the category navigation, and two more existing Merchandising features have been enhanced to support category navigation.

Promotions

You can now use Promotions to display banners on top of category pages, just like you can with the search results. With these banners you can direct your user’s attention to campaigns such as summer sales, new product releases or special landing pages.

You can use the same Promotion on search result and category pages, providing your users with a consistent shopping experience.

Product Placements

Another feature that has been enhanced to work with category navigation are Product Placements. Product Placements can be used to manually override Findologic’s ranking algorithm to pin certain products to the beginning of the search or category listing. This can be useful in cases where there is not enough information available to the ranking algorithm but the products need to be placed very prominently. One example could be brand new products.

Again, the same Product Placement can be used on search result and category pages for a consistent shopping experience.

Plugins

plentymarkets Ceres 5

Our plentymarkets Ceres plugin has been updated to support plentymarkets Ceres 5, the current major version of plentymarkets Ceres.

The Findologic plugin for plentymarkets Ceres 5 is available in the plentymarkets store and provides a full Plug&Play experience.

Shopware 6

Our Shopware plugin has been updated to support Shopware 6, the current major version of Shopware. Besides a full Plug&Play experience the latest version of the plugin provides a number of improvements:

• Staging mode: For customers without a dedicated staging system the plugin can simply be installed into the productive system. Its integrated staging mode allows you to configure and test the plugin without affecting your live users. This works for both Direct Integrations and API integrations.
• Configuration of Direct Integration containers: The required HTML containers for a Direct Integration can be configured in the Shopware backend, making a Direct Integration even less effortless.
• Config validation: The Shopware backend validates the Findologic shopkey to prevent configuration errors.

The Findologic plugin for Shopware 6 is available in the Shopware store.

Dev News // March 2020

Every few months our CTO Georg Sorst takes some time out of his busy schedule to show you some of the new features and technologies that our Development teams are currently working on or have released. Enjoy!

New JSON API

We recently launched our new JSON API, one of the most popular feature requests to improve integration of Findologic.

The main improvement over the existing XML API:

The XML API only includes the product IDs of the search results. This means that in order to display the search results on the website it is necessary to fetch additional data such as name, image and price from the database or ERP.

Now, with the new JSON API, all product data required to display search results is already included in the response. That way, the search results can be displayed right away without having to fetch additional data first. This simplifies the integration of Findologic and also improves the runtime performance so that your visitors enjoy an even faster search experience.

Even product attributes such as brand, available sizes and material can be included in the response. With this data you can for example show the different product variants to your visitors right on the search result page.

As JSON is the default protocol for Client-Side Frameworks such as Angular, React or Vue.js, our new JSON API is a great fit if your online store is a Single-Page Application (SPA). But of course, the JSON API can be used for traditional server-side integrations as well.

To get started visit our interactive JSON API documentation.

Status Quo Shopware 6 Plugin

Our Shopware 6 plugin already fully supports search and navigation results. Next up will be custom filters and navigation once Shopware makes them available for plugins..

Beta tests are by now up and running and initial results look great. If you are currently migrating to Shopware 6 or plan to in the near future, let us know!

Multiselect filters with result counts

Another very popular feature request is result counts for Multiselect filters.

Previously, result counts were not available for Multiselect filters so your visitors had no way of telling how many search results they would get if they select a filter option.

Now, result counts are also supported for Multiselect filters, just like they have always been for every other filter type.

In order to further improve the user experience we implemented a special handling if products have multiple values for the same filter, eg. product variants with different colors or sizes. In this case the displayed result count is the number of additional results if the product is selected. That way, your visitor can see right away if the filter would increase their selection.

You can enable the result count in the Customer-Login.