I’ve been programming my fingers off trying to get the last batch of major features introduced before Shopp goes into feature lock-down in preparation for the release. This last feature set is a doozy, both in development complexity and the power it will give Shopp owners. Although I’ve been patching bugs here and there as I go, the majority of the work has been poured into two main features: a fully AJAX-enabled cart and faceted navigation for categories.

AJAX-capable Cart

Thanks to some prodding by a committed beta tester, I bumped this up to be available before the 1.0 release. Shopp will ship with the cart functioning as a standard web post-ed cart. With just a couple minor shopp() tag options, you can turn on the AJAX behaviors. Perhaps more importantly, the cart can return JSON data representing the current contents of the cart, or it can dump an updated version of your sidecart.php template. Either way, it gives developers full control to extend Shopp’s basic AJAX cart implementation to do things I haven’t even dreamed of… If you want an idea of what’s possible though, I collaborated with one of our beta testers to write-up some basic drag-and-drop functionality so that shoppers can drag items right to the cart in just a few lines of jQuery JavaScript. You drop the product on right on the cart and the item is magically added with all the costs updated. Until I find a good way to provide a setting that doesn’t interfere with developers, you’ll have to setup custom theme templates in order to edit the templates and enable the AJAX cart behaviors.

Faceted Category Navigation

This really is the mother-lode. There are a lot of other high-end e-commerce products that do this, and I’ve been working hard to bring it to Shopp. Oh, what is it, you ask? Have you ever been shopping on a site and used one of those filtering menus that allow you to find products by price range, manufacturer and maybe a handful of other attributes? That’s faceted navigation. Don’ t blame me for the confusion, I didn’t name it.

Anyways, this is the feature that really ties everything together. It combines the product detail specs with category templates to help you build faceted menus at the same time as setting up shared details for products to use. It’s really amazing, and coming along, but the progress is slower than I would have liked. In order to implement it, I’ve had to go back through a large portion of the product editor’s interface code and re-engineer it to be more flexibly. The good news is, I’ve streamlined the editor code even more, and I believe even picked up some performance boosts. The bad news is, it’s going to delay the release until the weekend.

There are also a number of other minor enhancements that I think will make Shopp even more pleasant to use, such as separating the Products and Categories into their own sub-menus of the main Shopp menu. It works out rather well, especially with the upcoming UI changes in WordPress 2.7. There are a ton more minor tweaks here and there, and it all tells me the release is close.

Thanks for hanging in there. The wait for the next beta release will be worth it.