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We have three more really big updates to announce, each one bigger than the next. Let’s start with the first of the three. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been releasing a number of speed and search enhancements to the Sales and Products areas of your store’s admin dashboard, and we’d like to tell you about a few of them today.

Product Navigating & Searching Speed

For the first enhancement, look no further than your Products area. We’ve improved the loading of your products section, especially when paging back and forth across a very long list of products. Additionally, where searches across all of your products could have taken a while in the past, they now return instantly. Go on and give it try! We’ll wait.

Negative Search Terms

You’re back already? That was quick! Well, another of these updates includes support for negative search terms. Let’s say you put the word “Preorder” in the titles of all of your preorder products. When someone purchases that product, the order’s line item has a snapshot of the product and variation name at the time of purchase, so it will include the word “Preorder”. With negative search terms, you can now search in your sales area for unshipped orders matching “-preorder” and all orders for “preorder” products will be excluded from the search results. This should be a big help if you’ve found that your preorder sales have been crowding up your list of waiting-to-be-shipped orders.

When you’re ready to ship that preorder item, head over to the products area of your dashboard, remove “preorder” from the product’s title, and click the number in the “sold” column to search your sales area for every order that included that product.

Product Search Suggestions

One last enhancement we’d like to tell you about is the new “Search Suggestions” feature in the products area. Now, as you start typing a search term, we’ll instantly return matching products. Simply use your keyboard’s arrows or click on the product you want and the products area will update with that single matching product.

This update is perfect when you have a large number of products and want to easily jump around to see product stats and make edits. You already know what you’re looking for and now you don’t need to wait to find it.

We hope you find these recent search and speed improvements to your store’s dashboard helpful while managing your store. Enjoy!

Keeping with our recent stretch of Thursday announcements, we’re happy to tell you about the immediate availability of favicon support in themes!

Standard Themes

If you haven’t duplicated your theme to change HTML or CSS, follow these steps to set up your favicon:

1. Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
2. Go to your Storefront > Theme area.
3. Click the “Options” button on your current theme.
4. Scroll down to the “Favicon Image URL” option.
5. Click the “Upload Image” button and choose your favicon file (.ico or .png).
6. After your favicon finishes uploading, click “Save” at the top.
7. Click Storefront > View Storefront and gaze at your beautiful new faviconned storefront!

While your best bet for creating a favicon is to use either an .ico or .png file at 16px by 16px, some devices can support higher resolution favicons these days.

Custom HTML Themes

If you previously duplicated your theme (your “HTML / CSS” button is enabled), you may not have the favicon option. But don’t worry! With a few recent additions to our theming system, you can add a favicon option to your custom theme very easily. Just follow these steps:

1. Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
2. Go to your Storefront > Theme area.
3. Click your theme’s “HTML / CSS” button.
4. Scroll down and click “Edit” next to your “default.json” config file.
5. Scroll down to the bottom of the “settings” section and add the following setting:

...},

"favicon_image_url": {
"format": "image",
"content_type": true,
"label": "Favicon Image URL",
"help": "Enter an image URL or choose an image file to upload.",
"placeholder": "http://",
"position": 1000
}

Please Note: There must be a comma following your previous “setting-name”: {} block. Additionally, the “position” attribute above must not be the same as an existing “position” used in any other settings.

After you’ve done that, there’s just one more thing to add:

1. Click “Save” and then “Done”.
2. Click “Edit” next to your “default.html” layout file.
3. Scroll down to the right before your </head> tag and paste in the following code:

{{ config['favicon_image_url'] | favicon_tag }}

Lastly, click “Save”, “Done”, “Back to Themes”, and then you can simply follow the first set of instructions at the top of this post.

If you have any questions, please let us know. Otherwise, see you next week!

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve released some great features and improvements like Multiple Managers and Email Notification Settings. We’re culminating in a huge feature announcement before the end of January, but for now, let’s talk about our newest addition, Custom Theme Fields!

With the new Custom Theme Fields Module, designers using HTML and CSS in their custom theme can quickly add fields to Products, Categories, News Items, History Items, and Roster Items. After you’ve added fields to one of these things, you can use them in your dashboard just like other fields and then easily access the values from your custom theme.

There are countless uses for Custom Fields, but here are just a few:

• Add a preorder checkbox field to products and when checked, display a special banner on product pages, letting your fans know that item is a preorder.
• Add artist and album name textfields to products so that you can easily style them differently on product pages, rather than showing a single product name.
• Add a label logo image field to history items so you can display the logo of the label that released a record on its history item page.
• Add a product summary textarea field so that you can display product summaries on your shop’s index page and full descriptions on product pages.
• Add a video textarea field to roster items so that you can add a YouTube video embed code for each of your bands, that always displays in a certain part of your roster item’s page, separate from the description.

Those are just some of the things you can do with Custom Fields, and to help make them as flexible as possible, there are four types of custom fields you can create: checkbox, image, textfield, and textarea. The checkbox, textfield, and textarea fields are self explanatory, but the image field is a special helper field that provides an image upload button next to a textfield. Just click the upload button, choose your image, and an image URL will appear in the textfield.

After you’ve set up your fields and entered values on your Products, Categories, News Items, History Items, and Roster Items, you can access the values from your theme’s custom HTML like so:

{% if product.custom['preorder'] %}
  This is a preorder!
{% endif %}

Or output the value like:

{{ product.custom['album-name'] }} by {{ product.custom['artist-name'] }}

To get started, just follow these steps:

1. Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
2. Go to your store’s “Modules” > “Manage Modules” area.
3. Scroll to the bottom and install the “Custom Theme Fields” Module.
4. Go into a Product editor (or Category, News Item, History Item, or Roster Item editor).
5. Scroll down and click “Configure Custom Theme Fields”.
6. Decide what new fields you’d like available on all of your products, add them and click save.
7. The new fields will instantly appear. Add values and click save.
8. Update your theme’s HTML to use your new fields!

With Custom Theme Field, the possibilities are endless, so we can’t wait to see what you come up with! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

Last week, we announced a new feature called Multiple Managers, which helps a ton when you have more than one person working on your store. Well, we’ve just released a new feature that can work with Multiple Managers, or on its own. Email Notification Settings! Ever run a presale for an item you know will be ridiculously popular and don’t want to receive emails for the next few hours? Or maybe you don’t want to get emails for free digital orders anymore? What about if you have two people managing your store, one handles customer support and the other handles orders? Well now with Email Notification Settings you can adjust how you want to receive emails for each person managing your store separately. Pretty sweet, right?

To adjust your setting:

1. Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
2. Go to your store’s “Settings” area.
3. Next to where it says “User Account”, click “Change Notification Settings”.
4. Select the notification options you want.
5. Click “Save”.
6. Take a deep breath, and exhale.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

Multiple Managers is a great feature a lot of people have been asking for. Sometimes it’s annoying to have a single sign in email address and password for multiple store managers. But with this feature, you can invite others to help manage your store, while letting them have their own sign in details.

To add new store managers:

1. Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
2. Go to your store’s “Settings” area.
3. Next to where it says “Store Managers”, click “Add Another”.
4. Enter the email address of the person you’d like to invite in the “Invite Someone” box, and click “Send Invitation”.
5. Note that this person’s email address is now in the “Pending Invitations” section.
6. Once this person accepts your invitation, their email address will be located in the “Confirmed Managers” section.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.