v10 - Performance improvements

[brucet]

As well as the various new features, v10 will incorporate a number of changes designed to improve performance.

1. Improvements to the cache should in many cases improve site loading times and / or desktop performance, and will also eliminate a few known instabilities.

2. A new fast-find feature and performance tweaks to the Orders tab will make order processing smoother and more efficient for many customers.

3. Improvements to the Extended Information page functionality will make this a viable option out of the box for implementing a single product per page layout. This approach can deliver very significant performance improvements compared with using Subsections for the same purpose.

4. There will be a number of other smaller performance and usability tweaks and bug fixes.

[pixelhaus]

Improvements to the Extended Information page functionality will make this a viable option out of the box for implementing a single product per page layout. This approach can deliver very significant performance improvements compared with using Subsections for the same purpose.

This sounds very interesting and can't wait to see what will be on offer

[Joatmon]

Re: No.3. Improvements to the Extended Information page functionality

Having looked at the V10 Beta, I cant see anything new on the Extended Info tab that isnt present in V9. Am I missing something?

What specific improvements have been made to the functionality of these pages to make them a more viable option for Single Product Per Page?

Using these pages for the main product data has been a no-no for many (me included) for a number of reasons (mainly SEO related) - Has this changed with V10?

[cbarling]

No, I'm afraid that this is the one feature that had to be dropped towards the end of the v10 development.

Chris

[brucet]

OK, time to come clean, and well done for being the first to notice...

Unfortunately the changes planned for this turned out to be a lot more complex than anticipated, and we weren't able to get them into v10.

Our original intention was to adapt the extended information pages along the lines already described in the Advanced User Guide. But for technical reasons, there was no way to do that without manual changes to the layouts.

So our plan now is to create a new page type that is intermediate between section pages and extended info pages. These will accept an outer layout, have editable SEO elements and be includable in the Google Product feed, but without the performance disadvantages of section pages.

This basically involves separating out code from the two page generation processes and merging elements of each into a new piece of code, whilst identifying and taking into account the assumptions made in each of the originals. We were not able to do this for v10, but it's a top priority for subsequent development.

We're sorry for any difficulty this omission causes. But we would prefer to do the job properly and deliver something that's fully fit for purpose, rather than try to shoehorn a kludge just to meet the original target.

[Darren B]

Do you know if the new way of working, better than envisaged by the sounds of it, will be able to easily convert existing products to spp's aswell.

[Joatmon]

Thanks for the swift and detailed responses.

From testing/investigation already done, I presume the database is significantly smaller using Extended info pages rather than individual sections?

If that's true, Store owners with large numbers of products pushing actinic to breaking point could really have benefited from this development, not to mention those who just want to improve speed of upload/snapshot etc

I probably sit in both categories so obviously I am disappointed and will have to weigh up the options for my next website which will have a large number of products and which I really wanted to each have their own page.

PS When you do release this feature -Is it the intention that these new pages will appear in the actinic sitemap?

[brucet]

Is it the intention that these new pages will appear in the actinic sitemap?

That's a good point, thanks - I've added it to the list of requirements.

[brucet]

Do you know if the new way of working, better than envisaged by the sounds of it, will be able to easily convert existing products to spp's aswell.

How would you envisage that working? We might be able to create a small utility to move the product image, description etc to the new pages. But I'm not sure how easy or how safe it would be to try to eliminate single product subsections, for example.

[leehack]

My reservations on this are when you have a lot of products on one page. I'd urge you to make sure you test it with at least 100 separate products on one page. I worked on a site with 140 products in one section with extended info pages for each, when the section was selected, it took a full 2 minutes plus to appear in preview, whereas once converted to sub-sections it was taking just 6 seconds to preview.

[Darren B]

How would you envisage that working? We might be able to create a small utility to move the product image, description etc to the new pages. But I'm not sure how easy or how safe it would be to try to eliminate single product subsections, for example.

LOL i have no idea bruce but i dont fancy recreating 2500k spp's manually.

Seriously some form of automation would make it easier, as with current sections when you copy, it does not copy all the info. From memory i think it blanks the page title and meta descriptions.

I have not looked for a while but what ever way you guys do it it needs to make sure it populates these fields with the product details. You can then change these if you need later. But using the product description as a start for the page title would help. I'll let other SEO gurus offer some advice on exactly which field with what info.

Darren

[Duncan Rounding]

It would need to be importable via an hierarchical file. Perhaps a new header would be required to parse the changes if it might be a new page type.

[Jan]

I have always thought that for SSP's you should just have a checkbox on the parent section, with options perhaps on the format of the fake section pages settable on the section or product page (eg: generally the product thumbnail would be used but you could choose to pick an image up from the product, same for description etc) - people seem to generally just want a product image, a price and a description with the the sections displayed in rows.

[brucet]

I'd urge you to make sure you test it with at least 100 separate products on one page.

We will definitely test with some large sites and in various different configurations.

It may be that there is not one perfect answer for all sites. The subsection approach will obviously still be available for sites where that works best. We will do some benchmarking and if necessary try to provide some advice on the best method for the most common site configurations.

[brucet]

Thanks, I've noted all those points for when we start the development.