Datafeed Studio V3 is out now and ready for download. Existing customers should note that a V2 license is not compatible – see end of post for more details!

Price Boxes

DS V3 sees big changes around the way price comparison listings (now named ‘Price Boxes’) work, both under the covers and the way they are displayed.

From V3 you can finally edit the style of Price Boxes using a GUI editor in the admin site – no more hacking the Wordpress plugin or store template!

What’s more – the Price Box style can be shared between the plugin and stores. The styles can be found in the ‘Price Boxes’ admin tab. From here you can Preview existing boxes and edit / create new ones as shown below.

The default Price Box has also undergone some changes. Now subsequent prices from the same merchant are hidden by default – and clicking the link will dynamically include them in the result (you can disable this behaviour by opting for the ‘flat’ Price Box theme instead).

As an example over how much you can change the appearance of Price Boxes – this is another supplied style, named ‘category’.

Again – there is a flat variant of this style if you prefer to include all prices for a merchant.

Selection of which Price Box to use is in the ‘General Settings’ of each store – and a new menu appears in the updated Wordpress plugin where you can pick which one to use as a default.

Users of the Wordpress plugin who use the shortcode syntax can override this on a per query basis if desired, i.e.

[ds query='+elephant' pricebox=coolblue]

to opt for the ‘coolblue’ pricebox style for this particular query.

Talking of the Wordpress plugin, this release also sees client-side caching added to the plugin. With this enabled the plugin will cache Price Box results locally until the designated expiry time elapses (previously the plugin would contact your DS server each time). This results in much less bandwidth being used between your WP install and your DS server and is highly recommended.

Export Sites

V3 also sees the introduction of a new site type – named an Export site. This is a special type of site in that it allows you to export DS product categories into a 3rd party system like Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla (basically anything that supports the MetaWeblog API system) as individual posts.

This is ideal for those of you that want to quickly build a store site outside of the native DS store builder. All you have to do is define the mappings between DS categories and the target system categories and away you go (you can also edit the template used to create the pages).

DS remembers which products have already been created, so if you run a subsequent import for the same Export site only new products will be added.

New Networks

V3 also sees support added for Google Affiliate Network (GAN), LinkShare and SilverTap feeds. There is also an API Search client for LinkShare.

DS Free, Lite and Pro

From V3 there are three versions of Datafeed Studio available to purchase which vary in the number of feeds, sites and support level on offer.

See the order page for more details.

Upgrading and Licenses (Important)

If you are an existing V2 (or earlier) Datafeed Studio customer then you will need a new license BEFORE to upgrading to DS V3.

if you purchased V2 in 2010 then you are entitled to a FREE upgrade to DS V3 Pro. If you ordered prior to 2010 then there is a charge of £49 for a new license, should you choose to upgrade.

To obtain a new license send your existing ‘license.txt’ file to support along with the email address the license is registered against to start arranging the payment/delivery of a new one.

Once you have your new license the new version of DS can be installed in the usual manner (see the README.txt for full details).

This is a smaller incremental release after the big API changes of V2.8.

The main new feature is the addition of User Fields. Previously when mapping a feeds columns to the Datafeed Studio database format you were restricted to the fixed set of common fields, e.g. name, price, description, etc. with no scope for supporting special fields that might not be part of the common set.

This all changes with 2.8.1 which sees the introduction of four user fields, which you can map to any column in your feed. You can then access these in your templates (using the field names userfield1..userfield4), e.g. if you wanted to use them in a DS store site, you could add:

${p/userfield1}

within your templates, or if modifying the Wordpress plugin output, you could access it in traditional PHP way like so :

{$product['userfield1']}

within the rendering section of the plugin.

More Amazon Results - previously Amazon API searches only returned the first page of products from an API call (typically around 10 items). You can now configure a new ‘Max Results’ option in the Amazon API configuration page to have a larger result set returned.

One Per Merchant Option – a few customers have enquired about the option of limiting the number of items returned per merchant in a price compare listing to just one. With 2.8.1 you can do this, either by enabling the ‘One Per Merchant Option’ when doing a search via the admin site, or when using the shortcode syntax, using the new ‘one_per_merchant_ extra field, e.g. [ds query='+banana' | one_per_merchant=on].

Merchant Description in Output – since the first release DS has add a merchant description field associated with a feed but it’s never been utilised in the output. Now this field is part of the product meaning you can access it if you wish from your templates (field name is merchant_description). Some ideas for this are adding merchant delivery information, or special offers.

Note that the DS standard templates don’t include this information – but if you want to customise yours (or even the Wordpress plugin template) then this field is now available to you.

Optional Automatic Categories – Don’t like automatic categories and sick of seeing them cluttering up the DS admin site? Good news! From 2.8.1 there’s a new ‘Disable Automatic Categories’ option in the ‘Import Settings’ configuration screen that will delete created automatic categories from the next time you import.

Faster – a new database index should result in faster category displays when using DS store sites (thanks to David @ Affiliate Stores for the tip!).

Import Process more Robust – the import process will now skip feed files which it can’t open, instead of terminating the whole process. Skipped feeds will have their status set to ‘FAILED – NO FILE FOUND’ on the datafeed list screen.

Random Category Change – the ‘random product’ category has now been replaced with a ‘Latest Products’ category as the random option didn’t scale well with large databases.

Home Page Product Total – the number of products displayed on the home page now respects the “Items Per Page” configuration option (except if it is a manual category).

New PHP API function – the PHP API library (in extra/apiclient) that you can use to embed DS from within your existing PHP web sites has a new function, ‘dsapic_get_products()’ that only returns the products (with no rendering). This can be useful for developers if they want to do custom rendering or filtering before displaying products.

As usual, please read the upgrade instructions in the main README.TXT file before upgrading, and note, that unlike the previous release, this version does require some database changes to be applied, again, see the readme file for more detail on the best way of doing this.

You can download 2.8.1 here.

Apart from a couple of minor bug fixes, the main thrust of this 2.8 release is the introduction of a Web Service (REST) API that allows you to access your products remotely.

Product API

The first client of the new API is the Datafeed Studio Wordpress plugin.

The upshot is that you can now access your Datafeed Studio products from any Wordpress installation, even if it isn’t on the same physical host as your server!

There’s also example code in the ‘extra/apiclient’ folder which will show you how you can, with just a couple of lines of PHP code, include a price compare box on any PHP enabled web page that connects to your main Datafeed Studio site to get the product details.

This is great for including on one-page quick-hitters, e.g. this Punch Bags site, when you don’t really want to go through the hassle of installing Wordpress, or if you just prefer writing your own SEO optimised HTML pages but still want to have some dynamic product content.

Please note that the API must be enabled from the Config->Datafeed Studio API screen for the new Wordpress plugin / API clients to work.

In future releases the API will be expanded to offer more services so watch this space

User Functions

Another technical new feature in this release is the ability to create and access user defined PHP functions in the front-end store templates by creating a file in the new “user” folder named functions.inc.

Any PHP functions defined in this file will be available to use in the store templates.

For example, if you had the function :

function boo() {
	echo("Boo!");
}

In your front-end store template you could invoke this by doing :

<p tal:content="php:boo()"></p>

Note that PHP functions can also be used in the “tal:condition” attribute so you could write your own conditional functions.

ChangeLog

The full changelog is as follows :

• import process now does a “slug” call on the mykey for the rare cases where a mykey has non-standard characters (i.e. spaces)
• set CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER to 0 in CJ API to fix problems on some hosts if invalid/no certificate found
• support for user PHP functions. Any PHP functions defined in the file ‘user/functions.inc’ will be available to use in front-end templates
• made site $LOGOTEXT setting capable more flexible with accepting HTML/quotes
• added Help link for manual feeds
• removed redundant view log/import links on datafeed list screen for webservice merchants
• no longer defaults to first parser in list when creating a feed
• new config option to delete (automatic) feed files after import to save disk space
• cache folder created as part of installation process
• new standlone PHP API client library for accessing DS products from any PHP web page (see extra/apiclient folder for example usage)
• dynamic category type option now automatically set when creating dynamic categories
• support for remote content units via new built-in REST API server
• set connection timeout of 60 seconds when trying to downlod a feed
• cached file names are now based on a hashing algorithm
• CJ API fix to allow multiple products from the same merchant to be added at once

This release also contains the beta code for the forthcoming voucher code integration.

If you would like to test this drop me a line.

Upgrading – Important!

Existing users please see the main README.txt for general upgrade instructions (note that there are no database changes required for this release).

Also, if you are upgrading be aware that the the following lines must must be added to your .htaccess file :

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule api/v1/(.*)$ api/v1/index.php [L]

immediately after the “RewriteBase /” line.

Download

V2.8 is available from here.

Datafeed Studio V2.7.1 is now ready to download.

New in this release is support for custom fields, more flexibility around the import process – and some sexy new options for the Wordpress plugin (and searching in general).

Custom Fields

Custom fields allow you to associate ‘key value’ pairs against the products in your database, e.g. you might want to create a custom field named ‘Colour’ and then manually tag certain products with this field and the desired value.

You can then create custom searches to only include products that match one or more of these custom field values (along with the usual search criteria).

There’s no limit to the number of custom fields you can create in the system, and custom fields can be combined so if you had a custom field of ‘Colour’ and ‘Size’ you could perform a search for blue widgets that weigh 10kg.

New Price Compare Syntax

The next major feature is vastly more powerful searching for the Wordpress plugin – which has also been incorporated into the main admin site search, PHP get_products() API call and the ‘Price Compare this Product’ option when you edit a product.

With the quick search syntax you can combine multiple search options in just one line of text, e.g.

+xbox +360 -elite | min_price=50 max_price=100 exclude_merchants=1,2,3

Would search your product database for products that contain the words “xbox” and “360″ but would omit entries that contain the word “elite”. It would also only include products that cost between 50-100 and wouldn’t include products from merchants 1,2 or 3.

The new separator bar (pipe character ‘|’) after the search term indicates that extra options follow. You can omit the bar and extra options if you don’t need them for the search you want to perform.

Extra options have the syntax name=value (note that spaces aren’t allowed). Separate multiple extra options with a space.

Glossary of Available Extra Options

cf

Indicates a custom field, e.g. if you have created a custom field in your database named “colour”, the option cf=colour:red would include products that have this custom field with the value of ‘red’. Note the special custom field syntax of “cf=field name:field value”. Multiple “cf” options can be included in one search, e.g. “+notebook | cf=colour:black cf=hdsize:60GB”

description

Only return products that contain the value (anywhere) in their description field, e.g. description=’bass guitar’

exclude_merchants

Comma separated list of datafeed IDs to exclude from the search results, e.g. exclude_merchants=1,2,3. Handy for excluding Argos :-p

include_custom

If set to ‘on’, custom products will also be included in the search results, e.g. include_custom=on

max_price

Maximum price of products to include, e.g. max_price=100

max_results

Maximum number of results to return, e.g. max_results=25

min_price

Minimum price of products to include, e.g. min_price=50

model_number

Only return products that contain this value (anywhere) in their model_number field, e.g. model_number=S900

mykey_query

Only return the product with this key, e.g. “mykey_query=123_12345678″

only_merchants

Comma separated list of datafeed IDs to restrict the search to, e.g. only_merchants=59,92

order_direction

Direction of sorted results, one of “asc” or “desc” depending on preferred order, e.g. order_direction=desc.

order_field

Field which to sort results by, e.g. order_field=p.display_price to sort by price, or order_field=d.merchant_name to sort by the name of the merchant.

Import Process changes

You can now import more than one feed at a time on the admin interface (previously the only options were a single feed or ‘Import ALL’) by selecting the checkbox next to each feed you want to import.

The backend import process (admin/bin/import.php) which you can use to automate importing has also been extended. You can now specify a comma-separated list of feed IDs to import, e.h.

$ php import.php 1,2,3

or even specify a range of merchants, e.g.

$ php import.php a-f

will only import feeds for merchants that begin with the letters A through to F.

(The existing import options of “all” or a single feed ID are still there.)

Other Changes

There’s a new config option named ‘Include Product Name on Click References?’, which if enabled, will automatically append the product name to click references (previously only the product ID (key) was passed to the merchant).

This will help you read your affiliate network statistics and see what products are doing the business.

There’s also a few small non-critical bug fixes

Upgrading

See the README.txt file for details on upgrading from an earlier version. Note that if you are upgrading from V2.7.0 then only a single database change (see patch.sql) is needed for this release so you might just prefer executing that in phpMyAdmin (or a similar tool) instead of running the patch.php command to save time.

To download the latest version click here.

ps. if any users are interested in potentially Beta trialling voucher code integration in the New Year give me a shout. Merry Xmas :-p

V2.7.0 is now available to download.

This version has some major new features over the previous version, including :

• API Support for Affiliate Window (Shop Window V3) and Commission Junction.
• a GUI for the main configuration file
• Support for Amazon used prices
• Simple spam filtering (’human test’) for user reviews
• now uses libcurl instead of wget to download feeds – should make Datafeed Studio compatible with more hosts

For the full details see the CHANGELOG.txt file inside the distribution zip.

The biggest change is the new “API Search” tab on the admin interface, this replaces the old “Amazon Search” but acts in a similar fashion.

Instead of being restricted to just Amazon, you can now choose to search the Affiliate Window (Shop Window V3) or CJ networks for products to add to your database without having to download a feed file for the merchant.

In theory, you could now use Datafeed Studio without having to download a single feed file (I might have to rethink the name :-p ).

However, in practise this feature is most likely to be used to augment rather than replace your database, the situations I find it good for are when you are promoting a single product, which is available on lesser known merchants but you don’t really want to go to the trouble of downloading the merchant’s entire feed.

With the API you can just select what products you want from a particular merchant and add them to your own Datafeed Studio database. From that point on Datafeed Studio will treat it like it’s a “normal” product – and even keep any price changes (or other product information) in synch should it change.

This is done by the new “apirefresh.php” script, which replaces the now deprecated “amazon.php” script present in previous releases – but acts in the same way, except does it’s business cross-network.

If you are upgrading see the notes in the README.txt file for the usual upgrade instructions.

If you have any feedback on any of the new features, especially the API implementation, or if you have an API that you want supported, drop me a line.

Download v2.7.0.

Yep – V2.6 is out the door and ready for download

This is a major release if you use the “affiliate store” system of Datafeed Studio as the application now finally supports subcategories and automatic SEO friendly URLs of categories and products.

What took me so long? Well, personally, I always try to go that extra mile when I create affiliate store sites and manually create categories (including custom products), ensuring unique content…and supposedly a higher ranking on the search engines so I’ve never really put it as a high priority as I handcraft the slugs/permalinks myself.

Of course, not everyone has as much time as me so I’ve reluctantly caved in :-p

From this release on Datafeed Studio generates a SEO friendly URL for your product automatically (e.g. blue-widget.html) during the import process.

A new configuration option in the Site Editor named ‘Use Automatic Slugs‘ (enabled by default) allows you to toggle display of automatically generated slugs on and off. For new stores, you should leave it set, but you probably want to leave it off for old stores which already have pages indexed in the search engines.

Categories have also undergone a major makeover in this release. As well as the old manual and dynamic categories, this release introduces a third “auto” type. As their name suggests, these are created automatically from the categories provided by the merchants in their feeds.

The powerful thing about these categories is that you can add one or more matches to a particular category, e.g. you might have a category created automatically with the name ‘Wii’, you can then add additional ‘matches’ for terms such as ‘Wii Hardware’ or ‘Wii Consoles’ and any products matching these terms in their category description will be grouped into the main ‘Wii’ category.

That’s enough good news. The bad news is that these are such big changes (I nearly made this a V3 release, given the nature of the changes) meaning that if you have developed any custom themes these will need updating slightly in order to work properly.

Basically all this entails is prefixing URLs with the variable ${site/url}. Check out the layout.html and macros.html for any store theme and you should be able to work out the changes. If not, contact me and I’ll assist further. (If you have just updated the CSS then you don’t have to worry about this).

Apart from the slug and category changes, there’s a few minor bug fixes as usual, and little changes here and there, like the ability to nominate the home page category to display random products and additional permission checks during the install process. See the CHANGELOG.txt file in the distribution for more info.

To download click here. If you are upgrading please read the specific instructions in the README.TXT file.

I am pleased relieved (!) to announce the release of Datafeed Studio v2.5.

Wordpress Shortcode Support

Lots of new goodies in this new version, but my favourite has to be Wordpress shortcode support.

Huh?

Well, you may remember the last release included the debut of a Wordpress datafeed plugin, allowing you to display the products stored within your Datafeed Studio database inside your Wordpress page, i.e. for a displaying a price comparison box (example).

All well and good, but a bit clunky as you had to edit your Wordpress theme to include one line (to include the box) and then add two Wordpress custom fields to each post to actually display the box.

Well, it’s got even easier, by using the power of Wordpress shortcodes, you can now alternatively include Datafeed Studio powered price compare boxes anywhere within your Wordpress post or page, just by using the following syntax when writing your content within Wordpress :

[ds query='+pleo']

The above example would search your database for products matching the word ‘pleo’ (now sadly extinct, sob!) and display them within a price comparison content unit on your page.

There’s a few other options available, check out the Wordpress plugin documentation inside the extra/wordpress/dstudio for more detail. Note that by using the shortcode approach you can also display multiple price compare boxes on one page.

New Parsers

V2.5 also sees the introduction of two new parsers. First up, Datafeed Studio now supports the new Create-A-Feed type feeds that Affiliate Window is pushing heavily (against most affiliates will!).

This was trickier than anticipated as Affiliate Window don’t offer an option to download the new Create-A-Feed files in uncompressed format, just gzip or Zip.

Rather than code custom parser behaviour just for Create-A-Feed files, I’ve added a new “Post Download Script” option to parsers, where you can specify a script to run against a file after it has been downloaded.

99% of users wont need to go near this, but be aware this this option is there if you need it, and for the new Create-A-Feed parser it will call a script that will gunzip the downloaded file prior to import.

Also, a new parser is now built-in for Commission Junction datafeed files (CSV format, tab separated). Unfortunately CJ do not offer direct download URLs for their feeds so you will have to use manual (i.e. uploaded yourself) feeds with this parser. Watch this blog for a tip / script for getting around this in the near future.

Affiliate Store Changes

There’s a few new settings for the ’store/modern’ theme, including the ability to enter a contact e-mail address for your site, override the ‘Today’s Hot Deal’ text and change the footer HTML without hacking the templates.

Note that the store/modern theme, and the updated Wordpress plugin now include the product image when displaying the price compare content units. If this isn’t to your taste then you can change the default template as appropriate (or better copy the default theme to a custom theme so you don’t have to make the change if you upgrade again).

Also included is a new ‘Share Code’ option allowing you to include your own social sharing widget from the likes of AddThis or Share This on your affiliate product pages.

Download / Upgrading Instructions

For a full list of changes (over 25) for V2.5 check out the full CHANGELOG.txt within the distribution, which is available to download from here.

If you are upgrading from a previous version, see the (updated) upgrade instructions within the README.txt file.

Datafeed Studio V2.4 has been released and contains some nice shiny goodies

New for this release is the introduction of a handy Wordpress plugin so you can display ‘price compare boxes’ (content units) within the pages or posts of your Wordpress blog using products that are in your personal Datafeed Studio product database.

See this Wii Mario Kart page for an example of a Wordpress blog using this feature.

(Currently your blog must be on the same host as your Datafeed Studio installation – Javascript versions will follow).

Of course, unlike other content unit solutions, with Datafeed Studio you keep 100% of your commissions ;-p

For more information on this new plugin see the the new ‘extra/wordpress/studio’ folder included in the Datafeed Studio distribution zip file.

The other major feature of V2.4 is click reference tracking. Yes, you can now give each of your sites a unique tag which will be passed through to the affiliate network for tracking purposes. You can also, with the new snappily titled “$INCLUDE_PRODUCT_ID_ON_CLICK_REFERENCES” configuration setting opt to append the product key to this reference so you can tell exactly what site and product generated the commission for you!

I’ve been using this on my sites for the last week or so and I’m already wondering how I managed without this feature – no more guessing what page generated a sale.

This release also sees the addition of support for the Affiliate Future affiliate network which has been requested by a number of users.

Other changes in this release include increased flexibility of boolean product title searching. Note that the Admin site now no longer implicitly adds a ‘+’ prefix before each word allowing you to build more complex queries with AND (+), OR or NOT (-) prefixes yourself. See here for more information on how to construct boolean searches.

What else? Hmm…corrected scaling images on the admin search results page, and you can now sort the result columns by clicking on the column title. On the Amazon side, you can now import multiple Amazon products at once, and the application will also check if a product has already been added to prevent duplicate Amazon products in your database.

Apart from this, there’s a few minor bug fixes here and there, including 404 error codes for missing products (you’ll find a new 404.html template page for you to customise in the folder of the theme you use).

For more complete details see the CHANGELOG file in the distribution.

As usual, you can download the latest version from the download page and installation / upgrade instructions are available in the README.txt file.

Well, it’s nearly the big V-Day itself, so what better way to show my appreciation to Datafeed Studio users than a new version all ready for download?

Mainly just a few bug fixes and cosmetic changes this time around that I wanted to make public before working on some new features.

Without further ado, the changes for 2.3 :

• added simple file locking mechanism around the feed import process to stop simultaneous imports (a bad thing!).If you are upgrading you *must* add the following line after the first mention of $DATAFILE_FOLDER in your main config.inc file (inside admin/includes).

  $LOCK_FILE = $DATAFILE_FOLDER . “/import.lck”;

• corrected scaling (aspect ratio) of images when displaying products
• cosmetic change – moved top pagination links below category blurb when displaying categories
• opened up analytic tracking so you can insert your own tracking script (e.g. Mint, Piwik), instead of a Google Analytics ID on sites. Note – you will need to enter the script code for any existing sites you have that are just using the Google Analytics ID in the Site Editor settings.
• changed store modern theme display product pages to have anchored titles, best price link and review headers for increased SEO.
• fixed bug where upper pagination page value was incorrect for dynamic categories
• improved automatic cleanup of feed descriptions

Too upgrade from 2.2 you can just extract this Zip over your existing installation of you haven’t made any custom modifications. Otherwise backup your custom changes before unzipping.

A new month, a new release of Datafeed Studio.

2.2 has a host of new features to make your affiliate life easier, and a few back-end fixes to make things tick along faster, especially if you your product database comes in at around the million product mark.

First of all, let’s get on to the good stuff. Affiliate store sites created with Datafeed Studio now have a new “Auto Price Compare?” option.

If you enable this option then the software will attempt to build and display an automatic price comparision ‘box’ for the product currently being viewed based on its title.

Obviously, this isn’t as accurate as manually defining the matching criteria yourself via the ‘Price Compare’ field of a product but in my tests it does a pretty good job, and is a great help if you quickly want to get a store off the ground (or using it as a test of a niche before you devote further time to it).

Naturally, if you have defined the ‘Price Compare’ field already on the product, it will override the automatic price comparison feature.

Pretty cool, huh?

But wait – it gets better


As Chris Tarrant says before he quickly whips the cheque away, “we don’t want to give you that!“. v2.2 also sees the introduction of the similar ‘Auto Amazon‘ feature that can be set at store level.

If enabled, Datafeed Studio will do a web service call to Amazon to get the closest matching product in Amazon’s database – and will add it to the list of matching products when a product is viewed.

This, in combination with the aforementioned ‘Auto Price Compare’ feature makes it a doddle to display products without you manually having to define the exact price matching criteria, or manually adding Amazon products to your Datafeed Studio database via the existing ‘Amazon Search / Amazon Products’ tabs.

Essentially, these two features save a lot of time – and that’s one thing all of us are short of. Previously my Hulk Toys test site was a one product, one display price type site for 90% of the products as I never had the motivation to enter price compare details for ALL the products, but now with the two new Automatic checkboxes ticked, far more products have more than one price automagically showing. Result!


So, what else, Mr Studio?

Well, v2.1 has already made the whole shebang a lot faster with its fancy page caching, but v2.2 also ups the stakes with a far more efficient feed import mechanism.

Why? Well, I began noticing that even though the size of my product database wasn’t growing by much, database queries were slightly longer as the weeks and months went by. Investigating this I found that it was due to MySQL really not liking database tables that have frequent amounts of database inserts and updates as it results in fragmentation (which basically slows everything down).

So from v2.2 does things differently. Essentially when an feed is now imported, the existing products table is copied to a fresh new table and the import is performed against that new table. Finally, the old table is dropped and the new unfragmented table takes its place. This has had a significant effect on performance, and has even cut import times by around 40% for me.

v2.2 also has a new ‘Clone Product’ feature. Regular readers will know that my preferred way of using Datafeed Studio is to create ‘custom products’ with your own unique content, and then set the price compare field on the custom product to show prices from the feeds (many advantages – including your custom content will not disappear if a merchant suddenly drops a product).

The new ‘Clone Product‘ feature is a quick alternative to creating a new product, it will create a new product based on the content of the product you are viewing, with the description, images, price, etc. all copied over for you to customise as you see fit. Just a nice touch, really.

Another nice touch is the ‘Price Compare’ field of a product can now accept standard search phrases such as ‘+xbox +elite’, instead of the full SQL to generate a list of matching products.

Wow, this post is getting far too long and my two young nippers are hovering around me so I better end this quickly, there’s a few other bits’n'bobs, including WebGains parser support, see the full ChangeLog in the distribution for full details.

Grab it here.

(If you are upgrading, you will need to run admin/bin/patch.php from the command-line, or upload and execute ‘patch.sql’ via phpMyAdmin after extracting the zip file to get the full v2.2 experience.)