Whilst building my latest affiliate store for console bundles using Datafeed Studio I decided to add some new features to the application.

The main new feature is cache support across all the affiliate sites and pages created by Datafeed Studio. By setting the $CACHE_TIME_IN_SECONDS value in the main configuration file you can specify how long a page should be cached for. Personally for my sites I have set it to the number of seconds in a day.

Once a page is cached, any subsequent visit to the page will require no database calls whatsoever until the cache time has expired.

That’s not all in the performance stakes though. From v2.1 the SQL used when displaying categories and products has been optimised. Previously when displaying a page with say ten products, this would have required 21 (yes, twenty-one!) database calls. One for the initial product selection, and then two more for each product to gather additional meta information about the product.

From v2.1 a similar page will require just one database call. This, coupled with the new caching feature, should result in much faster response times for your customers.

Apart from that, there are a few presentation changes with themes. First, store themes have a new ‘Buy Now’ button which should increase conversions, secondly themes now include both the main stye.css file and the local CSS file.

Previously the local style.css was a complete copy of the main style.css file and this was the only CSS file included in a page view.

From this version pages load both the main style.css and the local style.css, with the local style.css being empty by default, but loaded after the main style.css so you can override or apply any new customisations you want to the presentation.

This is handy if you have several affiliate sites all using the same Datafeed Studio database and theme type as you can make a “global” change by changing the main style.css file, without having to update each of your sites individually.

For full details of all the changes in v2.1, see the ChangeLog within the Datafeed Studio distribution.

You can download v2.1 here.

Upgrade Notes : If you are upgrading an existing installation note that for this release you must run the patch.php command-line tool located in admin/bin to upgrade your database (alternatively you can import the patch.sql file manually into your MySQL version or using a tool such as phpMyAdmin).