v2.2.1 is yet another big release for us. With 2.1.0 the main development was around creating the new starter kit FastTrack.
But for v2.2.1 the main focus is around overhauling the product options. We now have Shared Options, UI Option and Product Option Content Types.
Shared options let you share a set of options between products, but manage them from a single location. This helps speed up your productivity when creating multiple similar products which have the same selectable options.
It also allows for enabling and disabling specific option/option value at a per product level. So if you had a 'Colour' Shared Option, with Red, Green and Blue as the option values. You could disable 'Red' on one product but let it be enabled on another.
We also now let you set the pre-selected option value, so on the front end you can choose which specific options you want products to default to.
UI Option is another new Merchello feature, which allows you to pass a value/hint to the front end of your store of what type of UI element should be rendered for the specific Product Option.
By default Merchello ships with 'Select List' and 'Radio Buttons'. But you can easily add your own values in the merchello.config under the <optionUi> section. A great example here would be 'Images', where you might want to display images as the selectable option UI on the front end of the store using custom JS… Which leads me to.
Product Option Content Types is a new feature in Merchello that work in the same way as the Product Content Types (Extended Content). It's the Document Types you want to associate/use with Product Options. Similar to Product Content Types, you can only have a single document type associated with any one option.
An example here would be, if you wanted to have an image representation for the option value that a user was selecting. You would create a Document Type with a media picker on it, and associate that Document Type for use with Product Option Content Types.
When you are adding Option values, you can then attach the Document Type to your option value and it will render the properties (In this case a media picker) in a dialog and you can then save the media/data against the product option value. Which will allow you to render that media via code in the front end of your store.
We hope you like these new option features, and always welcome feedback. We are striving to give you all the tools to make any type of store using Merchello.