We are really happy to announce the major update to the Custom Fields version of Cherry Picker.

New version 2.0 introduces something really cool. And we are eager to share it with you.

Increased performance

Cherry Picker can now travel with the speed of light. It updates results almost in no time, and here is why.

We completely reworked our SQL queries and the way they interact with Database. We were able to decrease the number of SQL queries itself. For example, if for average setup there were 100 queries, now there would around 7. As a result (also including other optimizations that we leave for you to discover) the loading time is decreased in up to 10 times (depending on particular setup it could be even more).

Dynamic Update of results

Cherry Picker is now able to update product results with Ajax. This means we do not update the whole page, but only the parts that need updating. As the result, filtered products appear much faster, and your server is doing less work.

On top of that, we dynamically update the URL in browser address bar with selected filters. This means the URL will always be up to date. And if your customer decides to share current page with someone else or bookmark it for later, later when he re-opens this page he will continue from where he's left.

It's a huge advantage in contrast to other scripts, that don't bother about it when updating the page.

It works in all modern browsers, except for IE9 and lower for whom the site will work as normal.

The setup is super easy -- just enable the option and provide your template's container that will hold updates. See this article for more info.

URLs are beautiful

We care about how links look. And unlike other filtering software that trashes links with excessive parameters:

..&param1=xx&param2=&parent1=[]=1&parent2[]=&pi=xx&li=&mprev=xx

in Cherry Picker this would simply be:

..&ram=8Gb

Load filters Progressively

We added new mode to the Simple drop-down layout which allows you to select filters one by one in progressive load. Choose whether you want to auto-submit filters once the last filter is selected. Works out of the box.

Restrict web crawlers from indexing filter links

You may ask "why would I want to restrict google from browsing filter links"? The answer lies in mathematics.

Filters have a nature of big numbers of all possible combinations. For example, let's assume there are 3 filters of Size parameter: S, M, L.

There would be the following possible filter selections:

So 3 filters will produce 7 possible links. And it grows very quickly: 20 filters will produce around 1 million, and 30 filters -- 1 billion of links.

Now imagine googlebot trying to crawl all those links... this would make a big strain on any server.

And since filters return basically the same content (same products in different combinations) we can restrict robots from crawling all the links.

Numerous other improvements and fixes

Improved interaction of multiple copies of Cherry Picker on the same page, where you could have different filters in different parts of the page.

To try Cherry Picker with these new features you can as always on our Virtuemart 2 Demo installation.

Pricing and Update

Despite this being a major update we want to get as many customers as possible to experience these new features. So we proudly announce that all current Cherry Picker Custom Fields users will have a free update. Contact us by mail to get access to the updated version.

For all our Cherry Picker Product Type users we want to let you know that the update that will have these features + something more is coming soon.