Brand new GD Products Center is here with many, many new features, tons of improvements and bugs fixed. Some of the plugin features have gone through significant changes, so I recommend taking a time to go through upgrade tutorial to bring your setup up to date first.
If you have any issues with links, redirection or broken pages, clear the permalinks rules, or try to cleanup registration data from plugins Tools panel, Maintenance -> Cleanup.
New version brings many new features and important changes, and this following video shows most important things in new version. Detailed videos for different plugin features will be published over the next week.
http://youtu.be/OfhgylJpzzU
Company Types
Most important feature in this version is introduction of company types. Right now, you have Brands and Sellers types, and you can’t create new ones. Also, these two types still don’t have front end single and archive pages. Brands can be used for filtering and Sellers can be used to add prices for each product with offer, URL and other things. For displaying prices, new page type is added to products called Prices and two templates are included to display prices grid. Here is the product interface for adding sellers and prices:
Right now for each company you can add Featured Image (Post Thumbnail) and that will be used for a logo for a company. In later versions more features will be added to each company type.
Compare Box
Old compare basket widget is now gone, and it is replaced with Compare Box. New box is added at the top of archive and single product pages. It displays products for current product type. Using functions box can be displayed on any location. In future versions, there are some improvements in planning stages. On the plugin settings page, there are many options for control over compare box.
More features and updates
There are many new things added: icons from Font Awesome to assigned to product properties, properties can be used to change sort order on products archive pages, settings for currency control… As for updates, there are so many of them in this version, and I will mention only few (for a full list, check the plugin changelog): generating page titles, types panel enhanced, improved loading and memory usage, settings panel, rewrite rules generating…
Plugin now has an option for websites that use cache plugins: due to caching of pages, it can happen that compare box shows undefined products. Just enable cache from the plugin Settings -> Advanced panel, and compare box data will be loaded using ajax and cached pages will not be a problem anymore.
Bugs fixed
Many bugs are fixed in this version: some indexing problems, deleting taxonomy assigned to product type, problems with product type cache, problems with some shortcodes, theme templates integration… For full list, check the changelog.
Over the next few days, I plan to add few more videos on using some of the new features (sellers, working with compare box), and to announce plans for the next 1.3 version. I did a lot of testing, and plugin works well, but I expect that I have missed some bugs. As always, please test new version and report all problems in the support forum.
www.dev4press.com/plugins/gd-products-center
Support Forum:
www.dev4press.com/forums/forum/plugins/gd-products-center