Cherry Picker

Best product filters module for Virtuemart and HikaShop.

Cherry Picker was originally created in 2009 for Virtuemart and was the first and only module to provide a sophisticated filtering opportunity for a Joomla based shopping cart. Since then it has gone through many iterations and thanks to a close work with a wide community it is now the best filters to satisfy a vast range of needs and expectations.

Compatibility

Cherry Picker supports all versions of Joomla and

You can use it for either of the shopping carts:

Performance

For some store owners due to a large amount of products Cherry Picker had no alternatives because of its fast search capabilities. Even if you have tens of thousands of items in your store you don't need to worry whether the filters will heavily load your server or the page will take forever to load -- Cherry Picker works blazingly fast. Here are some of the quotes:

Customization

Do you want filters to be displayed vertically as a simple list? Or maybe compactly and horizontally above the products with a drop-down menus?

Do you want products to be updated immediately when the filter is selected or maybe you want your customers to select a bunch of filters before clicking an Apply button?

Or maybe you want filters itself to be loaded progressively one by one allowing customers to select in a top-down order: first comes car Brand, then the Model and after that comes specific part numbers?

Whatever your preferences are, Cherry Picker is highly customizable and will allow you to built great interfaces.

Dynamic update

For even faster product search and smoother UI both filters and products could be updated dynamically with Ajax. You can even configure the exact behavior: whether to update just filters or maybe you'd prefer the products to be reloaded when the final filter is selected in progressive mode — the choice is left for you.

Stock filter

Display a dedicated "In-stock" filter that will show only those products that are currently available for purchase.

Version differences

This topic concerns Virtuemat users. Virtuemat 2 introduced new Custom Fields that you'd use to manage filters. However for a greater versatility we provide two versions of Cherry Picker:

• one using native Custom Fields.

  You'd need no other tools except for Cherry Picker itself. Simply follow this guide on how to create filters using Custom Fields.

• and the other one using Product Types.

  This version uses another filter structure represented in Database. And since this structure better suits filtering purposes the performance of it is higher then of the Custom Fields version.

  You would use Fast Seller — a dedicated component — to manage Product Types. Rather naturally, because of the close integration between Fast Seller and this particular version of Cherry Picker, there comes a whole set of other advantages, such as:

  • the use of trackbars for any parameter

    

  • the use of color palette filters

    

  • the use of Quick-refine fields

    

  • set individual options for each parameter displayed in filters.

Breadz

Standard breadcrumbs modules will not display all possible refinements such as filters, manufacturers, price selection, search keyword etc. You get access to a special breadcrumbs module called Breadz that will greatly improve your shopping cart ecosystem.

URLs

You should have noticed how certain Joomla modules and components use the URL to clutter it with garbage parameters, for example:

/store/?&param1=xx&param2=&parent1=[]=1&parent2[]=&pi=xx&li=&mprev=xx

Cherry Picker, on the other hand, keeps it clean and neat which improves SEO and results in better Google results ranking:

/store/?brand=Apple

Cherry Picker also manages all necessary meta tags for you.

More features

• No need to replace, edit or hack any core files to get filters running.

• You can hide filters either by using Collapsible Headers, Scrolling Lists or See more.. option, or any combination of them.

  

• By creating multiple copies of Cherry Picker module you can have different types of filters displayed in different parts of the page with unique layouts (for example display Brands and Models above products with drop-down menus, and show a larger list of filters in the left sidebar).

• Search by Price accompanied with intelligent trackbar that highlights the range of available products:

  

• Search by Price including Taxes, Discounts and other price adjustments.
• Search in subcategories: enable Cherry Picker to look-up for filters in categories below and even filter products while being in parent category.
• Display available Manufacturers as filters.
• Complete multi-language support.
• Cherry Picker automatically picks up filters for the current page allowing you either to search all products globally withing the store or just the particular ones in current Category or for the selected Manufacturer.
• You can use CSVI to bulk import or export filters.

Live examples

You should check real websites already using Cherry Picker. Please note the variety of set-ups and configurations.

Glimpse at the back-end

These are the options of the Custom Fields version of Cherry Picker for Virtuemart:

License

Extension is distributed under the terms of GNU GPL, version 2.