Jshop 2.3 overview

The latest version of Jshop was released in the latter half of 2010 so I though it was about time for a quick write-up on some of the new and updated features.

Revamped discounts and offer codes

Jshop gets a huge boost in it’s discount and offer code facilities:

  • You can now finely tune how discounts are applied, eg based on goods total, shipping total, cheapest free, most expensive free, qualifying discount, or qualifying price
  • Discounts can be restricted to individual sections, individual products, groups of sections and products or even by customer type
  • Automated discounts now have title, description and image fields, these can be output as “discount” pages on your site, or as extra product information on any relevant page

New CMS (Content Management System)

Well we did ask for it and Jshop provided! Called “Articles”, the new CMS is a very powerful and flexible tool with a huge amount of well though out features. It works in a similar fashion to product sections in that you can create a multi layered pages system, nesting sub pages as far as you want.

“Articles” will eventually replace the current News system and it’s flexibility now allows you to easily manage help pages, news, and multi level content such as FAQ’s, support documents or even a photo gallery.

  • Ability to publish articles (pages) and subarticles (sub pages)
  • Supports extra custom fields, eg extra image fields, extra text input fields etc
  • Can restrict access to certain pages to certain customer types, or just hide any page
  • Ability to select from different page templates
  • Ability to sort the order of published articles
  • Include or exclude any page in the RSS feed

Search suggest

Your customers can now find stuff even quicker with the new search suggest feature. You can configure how it works, eg minimum trigger word length, number of items to display or the order of the displayed items.

SEO page titles

Jshop has never had any problems getting pages indexed by search engines but this new feature will add even more power to your listings. Normally URL titles are based on the section/product name but this optional setting allows you to create custom titles if you need them.

Single page checkout

Another superb step forward is the optional one page checkout. This will make checking out a lot quicker when it’s needed and there is still the option to use the original 2/3 step version if you need to.

  • If enabled, Customers can (optionally) create an account, or login to their existing account on the checkout page
  • Falls back to 2/3 page checkout if javascript is disabled
  • Option to show or bypass order confirmation screen

Other new features

There are over 30 other enhancements to both front end and the admin area, too numerous to list but here are a few highlights:

  • Now supports paypal Express, Paypal Pro and Google Checkout
  • Support for canonical LINK tag
  • Automatic generation of XML sitemaps
  • RSS feed for products and sections

by Rob Allen | Filed in Ecommerce