Solidshop Core 1.1.0 — CSV product import & export, and faster listings

Solidshop Core 1.1.0 is available now. The headline is a feature we've been asked about since day one: CSV product import and export. Alongside it, this release makes product listings and the wishlist substantially faster, and fixes two listing bugs worth knowing about.

CSV product import & export

You can now move your whole catalogue in and out of Solidshop as a single CSV file, from Products › Import and Products › Export in the administrator. That opens two doors at once:

• Migration. The file format is the shape other carts already export — one row per variant, rows of the same product grouped together. Competitor headings such as Handle, Body (HTML) and Variant Inventory Qty are recognised and mapped automatically, so a Shopify or WooCommerce export imports without you renaming a single column.
• Spreadsheet editing. Export your products, fix prices, stock or descriptions in your spreadsheet of choice, and import the file back. Multilingual stores get per-language columns like Name [vi-VN], so translations travel in the same file.

A few design decisions make this safe to use on a live store:

• An empty cell means “leave alone”, never “clear”. A two-column file with just an identifier and a price is a perfectly safe bulk price update — nothing else on the product is touched.
• Imported products are real products. The import writes through the same save pipeline as the product edit screen, so imported items get the same alias handling, variant generation and events as products you create by hand — they are indistinguishable afterwards.
• Large catalogues just work. Imports run in chunks with a progress bar, and exports stream page by page, so neither is limited by PHP time or memory limits.

Two current limits to be aware of: image columns must reference files already in your Joomla media folder (remote image URLs are not downloaded), and exporting a product with more than three options truncates it — the export screen tells you how many products are affected before you download.

The file format, column reference and migration walkthrough are covered in the import & export documentation.

Faster product listings and wishlists

Product listing pages used to re-fetch every card through the full product detail pipeline — on a 20-card page that meant 82 database queries doing work that was thrown away. 1.1.0 builds cards directly from the listing query instead, and the Products module gets the same treatment. Variant-heavy catalogues see the biggest gains.

The wishlist got the same pass: on a small three-item wishlist it saves 41 queries per page view, and considerably more when variants are involved. It also fixes a nasty edge case — a single wishlisted product that was later unpublished used to break the entire wishlist page with an error. It is now simply left out, the same way listings leave it out.

Listing fixes

• The Product List menu item's category filter now works. The “categories” selection on the menu item was never applied, so every Product List menu item showed the full catalogue. Menu items now list exactly the categories you picked.
• One bad product can no longer take down a listing. A draft product, a scheduled product whose publish window hadn't opened, or a product in an unpublished category could 404 the whole listing page. Listings and product pages now agree on what is viewable, and anything that isn't is skipped rather than fatal. This also closes a small leak where unpublished products could appear in the storefront listing.

Updating

1.1.0 is a one-click update from System › Update. There are no database changes and no manual steps. The version jump to 1.1 reflects the new import/export feature — the update itself is as routine as any patch release.

For the complete, itemised list of changes, see the Solidshop changelog.