The Smartstore plugin MegaSearch has received a major technical improvement that speeds up the filtering of products by product groups. This update affects all users of the plugin.
The standard search for store items in Smartstore often reaches its limits in online stores with a large product selection and extensive product ranges. For this reason, there is the MegaSearch extension. The MegaSearch and MegaSearchPlus plugins replace the simple search and offer a functioning, fast and intelligent acceleration and more sales.
The "Lucene" search technology forms the basis for MegaSearch and offers a wide range of full-text search options. These include automatic typo correction, text analysis, synonyms and weighting of search hits. Relevant suggestions are displayed as soon as the search term is entered. Even with a large number of data records, MegaSearch delivers fast and precise results.
The MegaSearchPlus plug-in extends the functions of MegaSearch with localized and language-dependent data, multi-store and access restrictions as well as product and specification attributes.
Optimization for massively nested product groups
The new increase in speed is particularly noticeable in product group navigation in the store frontend, especially if the store has many product groups and the "Include products from subcategories" setting is activated.
A practical example of this is a store with technical industrial products, which has an astonishing 40,000 product groups, some of which are deeply nested. Thanks to the improvement, product group navigation in this store is now much faster.
Technically speaking, filtering is no longer based on product group IDs, but on the "category tree path". This is a filterable character string that contains all the IDs of the category path.
IMPORTANT: With the next store update (probably to Smartstore version 5.0.5), the search index in MegaSearch must be recreated once so that the category tree path is included in the index.
Without reindexing, category filtering will not work correctly.
Reindexing can be triggered manually in the MegaSearch configuration. To do this, store administrators go to the backend and select "Plugins > MegaSearch". In the table you will find information about the catalog index. On the right-hand side, there is a menu with the command for manual "reindexing" (rebuild index).
With this technical improvement, MegaSearch offers an efficient solution for quickly filtering products by product groups. Benefit from an improved search experience in your Smartstore store!