Smart Product Collections Documentation

The Nop Smart Product Collections allows you to create fully customizable lists of products anywhere on your site. The information for each collection is loaded dynamically using Ajax, without slowing down your initial page load.

Please read the following steps for more information on how to configure the Nop Smart Product Collections.

GENERAL SETTINGS

To start using the Nop Smart Product Collections plugin, please make sure that the plugin is enabled.

1. Enabled - Specify whether to enable the widget for the Nop Smart Product Collections Plugin, thus enabling or disabling the plugin. This is a store specific setting and can be set per store if you are running multi-stores.
   
   

CATEGORY PRODUCT COLLECTIONS

You can create a Category Product Collection with products from a category and group them in different product tabs based on a certain criteria e.g. new, sale, featured, bestsellers, etc.

You have an additional category navigation with picture and subcategories for each Category Product Collection.

The Category Product Collections are mostly usable on the home page to show your featured categories along with their products inside. You can have as many Category Product Collections on your homepage as you need.

The following settings are used to configure the Category Product Collections:

1. Enabled - Check to show the collections.
2. Widget Zone - Choose the widget zone in which the collections will be integrated. Only home page widget zones are available by default. But you can add your own widget zones to the SupportedWidgetZones.xml file in the plugin should you wish to do so.
3. Show Products From Subcategories - Check to show products from the subcategories of each category.
4. Number Of Subcategories To Show - For each collection you have an additional category navigation which shows to the left of the products. Use this setting to specify the number of subcategories to be shown for each category navigation.
5. Category Images Orientation - This setting controls the orientation of the category picture in the category navigation. Select "portrait" if your category images are portrait or square. Select "landscape" if your category images are landscape.
6. Number Of Products - The products in a Category Product Collection are grouped in tabs based on different sort criteria: new, sale, featured, bestsellers, etc. Use this setting to set the number of products to show in each tab.
7. Categories - This is where you can add and edit Category Product Collections. We will show below how to configure these.

To add a new Category Product Collection start by choosing your category. Start typing in the search box and the autocomplete will show you the suggested categories. You can add as many categories as you need. Each category represents a single Category Product Collection.

Once you select a category it will appear as shown below with the options to edit or remove it. If you have more than one category you can re-order them by Drag&Drop.

If you want to edit the products for a category, just click its edit button. When the edit button is clicked, the tabs for the current category will be loaded. These tabs will contain the products from the category. We will explain how the tabs are managed in the section Manage Product Tabs.

Custom Product Collections

The Custom Product Collections are groups of products selected from predefined lists such as category, manufacturer, vendor. Additionally, you can create a custom list of products based on your own criteria. These lists are grouped together in a single widget. You can have as many of these widgets as you need and add them anywhere on your website. 

To start adding Custom Product Collections to your store go to the Custom Product Collections administration and click the "Add New" button. The following settings are used to configure the Custom Product Collections:

1. Published - Set whether the product collection is visible on the public site.
2. Title - Set the title of the product collection. The title will appear in the public site.
3. Widget Zone - Select the widget zone, where the product collection will appear.
4. Store - Select the store for which the products collection will be shown. The products available to the product collection preview are based on this setting after it is saved.
5. Number Of Products Per Tab - The products in a Custom Product Collection are grouped in tabs based on different source types: new, sale, featured, bestsellers, category, manufacturer, vendor etc. Use this setting to set the number of products to show in each tab.
6. Display Order - If there are more than one product collection in the same widget zone use this setting to control the display order of this product collection.
   
   

Below the General Settings you have the Tab Builder panel, where you can manage your product lists and the tabs in which they will show.

Manage Product Tabs (Tabs Builder)

To add a new product list click the button "Add New Products Tab". Clicking this button will show the products tab in which the products will be shown.

The first thing you need to select is the source type of the tab. If you are inside the Category Product Collections administration then you will not need have this option. The source for a Category Product Collection is implicitly pre-selected to "Category".

You can select between these sources: Category, Manufacturer, Vendor, Featured Products, Best Sellers, New Products, Marked As New and Custom List.

If you choose source type "Category", "Manufacturer" or "Vendor" there is one extra step - to choose the entity and the sort method.

Once you choose a source (entity and sort method), a preview of the products will appear below.
Note that the products you see in the administration may not be the same as those which customers will see in the public site due to ACL restrictions.

You can also create your own custom list of products. When you choose Custom List as the source type you will have a control panel where you can add products to your list. If you are familiar with our other plugins you will recognize this as the product mapping framework. Once you select the products they can be re-ordered by Drag & Drop.