A new module release and, finally, a post from Brock!

September 2, 2008 on 3:58 pm | In Design and Development, Module Releases/New Features |

It started out as a module for Merchant 5.x to display randomly selected products on the storefront page but it turned into quite  bit more than that.

The new Features (yes, that’s the name) module provides additional Features for your Merchant 5.x store. With the placement of the module’s item tokens you can display, anywhere in your store, products randomly selected from your store, products randomly selected from particular categories, your store’s best sellers, and more! The module accomplishes this by tying particular tokens to templates configured from within the module’s admin. You can specify the exact layout of the template and display it anywhere in your store with a single item token. Particular details about the items are configured with separate tokens in the templates (for example, you can separately arrange where to display a product’s thumbnail and name).

The module comes with the follow templates but you can add as many as you want:

• Random Products
• Random Products from Category
• Best Sellers
• Images from List
• Random Images from List
• Products from List
• Random Products from List

You can find the details on what each of these templates does in the module’s documentation here and you’ll find it in our store here.

Those among you familiar with our Storefront Template module will recognize some of the functionality in the new module as it uses the same sorts of tokens (many are identical) and functionality. But instead of focusing only on the storefront page this module will let you display the templates just about anywhere.

The module went through the development process pretty quickly but has a few major features, such as the ability to preview templates in your store before making them live, that will be showing up very soon in a number of other new modules.

Speaking of new modules, the Focus module (it’s been a long time but I vaguely recall having posted here about it before), our uber-search module for Merchant has undergone a re-working to provide for the hosting of the search indexes on our own server rather than locally on the store’s servers. This has greatly improved the installation process and has moved us quite close to a final release. Don’t hold me to it but I’m hoping to have it in the store within the next two weeks.

-Brock

As an interesting aside, when we formed VikingCoders we each searched around for monikers from Norse mythology to “add to the mystique” so to speak. I stumbled upon “Brok”, one of two dwarves that worked together to create Thor’s hammer. Seemed like quite a remarkable coincidence so it stuck….perhaps too well. It wasn’t long before I was the only one with a “Norse moniker” and “Brok” is close enough to “Brock” the line is often blurred as to which is correct.