Phoca Cart has recently unveiled its highly anticipated version 5, a major update packed with a range of new features and improvements designed to enhance both functionality and user experience for online store owners. This release brings significant upgrades across multiple aspects of the e-commerce platform, from visual design to technical performance. Here’s a rundown of the most noteworthy features in Phoca Cart 5.
1. Dark Theme Support
Phoca Cart 5 introduces full dark theme support, making it visually compatible with dark mode settings both in the frontend and the administration panel. This update caters to modern user preferences, allowing online store owners and their customers to switch to a sleeker, eye-friendly interface that works seamlessly in dark mode.
2. Watermark and AVIF Support
In terms of image handling, Phoca Cart 5 adds support for watermarks and the AVIF image format. Following the earlier adoption of the modern WEBP format, Phoca Cart now also supports AVIF, a format known for its superior image compression. Additionally, store owners can now apply watermarks to their product thumbnails, ensuring brand protection and image quality.
3. SQL Query Optimization
Phoca Cart 5 introduces enhanced SQL query optimization, significantly improving performance for large stores with tens of thousands of products, thousands of categories, and hundreds of thousands of orders. While product list queries typically use pagination and were not a performance issue, we focused on optimizing category lists, especially when loading them into trees. This area saw the most significant improvements.
4. Advanced Product Batch Processing
If you use the batch function to copy products and duplicate entire products or just some of their properties, you'll be pleased to know that product batch processing has been significantly expanded with many additional parameters. In Phoca Cart 5, the options for selecting what to include when copying a product have been significantly expanded.
5. New Multilanguage Feature
The latest release of Phoca Cart 5 introduces a major innovation: a brand-new multilanguage feature designed to overcome the limitations of previous multilingual support. In earlier versions, Phoca Cart supported the standard Joomla core multilanguage system and external extensions. However, these solutions had some drawbacks. External extensions lacked full plugin support, while Joomla’s core multilanguage feature was not ideal for e-commerce. Joomla’s core multilanguage feature system assigns a new database ID for each language variant, leading to challenges such as separate stock management for the same product in different languages. To address these issues, Phoca Cart 5 introduces a completely new multilanguage system that operates on the database layer. This solution is significantly faster, more efficient, and eliminates the previous limitations. Additionally, Phoca Cart 5 now supports the n3t Language Filter extension, which is especially useful for handling parameters stored in global settings.
6. Back in Stock Notification
For online stores with popular products that occasionally run out of stock, Phoca Cart 5 now includes a Back in Stock Notification feature. Customers can sign up for alerts to be notified as soon as a product they are interested in becomes available again, helping to maintain customer interest and reduce lost sales.
7. Schema.org Support
In response to the growing importance of structured data for SEO, Phoca Cart 5 introduces support for Schema.org markup. This feature allows store owners to integrate rich product data directly on product pages, which can improve visibility and enhance search engine optimization. Enabling Schema.org support through the Phoca Cart options ensures products are properly indexed with relevant metadata.
8. Joomla Mail Templates Integration
Joomla 5.2 introduced the Mail Template Layout feature, which Phoca Cart 5 now takes advantage of for sending emails. This feature allows for greater flexibility in managing email templates by enabling the creation of custom layouts. It not only provides the ability to design personalized templates, but also introduces the option to send various multilingual versions of emails. With this improvement, it’s easier to manage both the presentation and language options for outgoing communications.
9. New Payment and Shipping Plugins
Phoca Cart 5 expands its payment and shipping options with a selection of new plugins. These additions provide greater flexibility for store owners when configuring payment gateways and delivery methods, helping them accommodate a broader range of customer preferences and requirements.
10. New Templates
Phoca Cart 5 introduces seven new templates, offering both child templates for the core Joomla Cassiopeia template and standalone templates designed for unique store designs.
New child templates for Cassiopeia:
- Phoca Cart Toys Child Template
- Phoca Cart Tools Child Template
- Phoca Cart Furniture Child Template
- Phoca Cart Beauty Child Template.
These child templates provide flexibility while maintaining compatibility with the default Joomla Cassiopeia template.
Standalone Templates:
- Phoca Cart Premiere Template
- Phoca Cart Horizon Template
- Phoca Cart Gourmet Template.
These three standalone templates stand out for their simplicity and efficiency. What makes them particularly unique is that they do not rely on any external frameworks, yet they offer the same powerful features as framework-based templates. For instance, users can switch to dark mode, customize the layout with additional rows or columns for different module positions, and more—all of which can be set directly within the template settings.
Despite the introduction of these new templates, Phoca Cart continues to support popular template frameworks such as YOOtheme, Gantry, Helix, T4, Astroid, Sparky and others. Phoca Cart output is available in the latest versions of Bootstrap or UIkit. UIkit is specifically used for YOOtheme templates, with full support for the latest YOOtheme Pro. Very interesting extensions are currently being created for this framework, such as PCUikit and others.
Looking Forward to Joomla 6 Compatibility
Phoca Cart 5 is fully optimized for Joomla 5, but it also prepares for future compatibility with Joomla 6. The codebase is being fine-tuned to ensure seamless integration with upcoming Joomla versions, ensuring that Phoca Cart will continue to deliver excellent performance as Joomla evolves.
Conclusion
Phoca Cart 5 represents a major step forward in enhancing the performance, customization, and functionality of online stores powered by Joomla. From dark theme support and image optimization to a revamped multilanguage system and new templates, this update introduces numerous features that will greatly benefit store owners looking to improve their e-commerce operations.
The development and testing process for Phoca Cart 5 involved contributions from a large community of developers, testers, and translators, with over a hundred beta versions released. The Phoca Cart team expresses its gratitude to everyone who supported the development, from contributing code and translations to providing valuable feedback.
With its robust set of new features, Phoca Cart 5 is set to deliver a faster, more flexible, and more powerful e-commerce solution for Joomla users.