msCatalyst

msCatalyst renders a miniShop2 or MiniShop3 catalog as a faceted filter with search and keeps that catalog up to date. One snippet outputs the filter panel, counters, sorting, search, pagination and product cards. Sync loads and updates products from CSV and XLSX, any JSON or XML API, Google Sheets and 1C.

Without JavaScript the filter works as a plain GET form. With JavaScript the page updates over AJAX, and the browser URL changes along with the filters.

Demo: chelnysite.ru, a catalog of 100,000 products on shared hosting. The English version of the same catalog runs on Localizator: chelnysite.ru/en/. The component manager page is open without a manager login: chelnysite.ru/admin-demo.

Features

• Facets by vendor, category, product fields, TVs, options and resource fields. Prices and options of msOptionsPrice2 and ms3Variants modifications.
• "From–to" ranges with a slider for price, weight and any numeric field.
• A counter next to every value. Picking a value in a group does not zero out the other values of that group.
• Search with word forms, transliteration, typos, field weights and synonyms. Modes: inside the catalog, a separate page, a dropdown.
• Search query log: what shoppers look for and what they do not find. A query with no results gets a synonym in one click.
• Every filter and page change goes into the browser history. The "Back" button returns to the previous results.
• Speed on 100,000 products: results and all counters are recalculated in 10–40 ms on the server.
• SEO: title, H1 and description with the selected filters arrive in the HTML on first load. Friendly filter URLs, a sitemap.
• Landing pages with own URLs, texts and Russian word forms in all six cases, singular and plural. No SeoFilter needed, MODX 3 included, and msCatalyst imports an existing SeoFilter setup.
• Profile-based sync: source analysis, field and catalog matching, an approved schema, a change plan with safeguards, run rollback.
• Easy on the hosting at any volume: sync runs in short steps, skips an unchanged file, caps images and archives, and prunes old runs and logs. The index rebuilds in the background, visitors do not wait for it.
• Export of products, categories, vendors and options to CSV, XLSX, JSON and XML.
• Multilingual catalog with Localizator, localizator3 or Babel.
• A manager page without ExtJS: search test, synonyms, query log, settings, index, filter sets, landing pages, sync, export and translations.

Requirements

• MODX 2.8 with miniShop2 or MODX 3 with MiniShop3. miniShop2 does not install on MODX 3. For MODX 3 its authors release MiniShop3.
• pdoTools.
• PHP 7.2 or newer. MODX 3.2 itself requires PHP 8.1.

Without a shop or pdoTools the installer stops and writes the reason to the error log.

Tested combinations:

• MODX 2.8.8, miniShop2 3.0.7 and 4.4.2, pdoTools 2.13.3, PHP 7.4;
• MODX 3.2.0, MiniShop3 1.14.1-beta2, pdoTools 3.0.3, PHP 8.4.

Installation

1. Add the modstore.pro provider in "Extras → Installer" and install msCatalyst.
2. The installer creates the msCatalyst category: the snippets msCatalyst, msCatalystSearch, msCatalystSitemap, msCatalystLandings, msCatalystReindex, msCatalystSeoFilter, msCatalystSync, msCatalystDemoAdmin, a plugin, ten chunks, system settings, the sync and landing page tables.
3. Call the snippet in the catalog template as described in Quick start.

License: one purchase per site.