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- AJAX search. Enabling it displays a list of results from the moment your customers type a few letters into the search bar, as seen below.
- Instant Search.
- Minimum word length. You can choose the minimum size at which a word may be registered in the search index and found by your customers. This feature allows you to eliminate short words in the search, such as prepositions or articles (the, the, of ..).
- Blacklisted words. You can choose the terms that must not be found by your visitors. Enter them directly into the field separated by "|".
- Product Name Weight. PrestaShop lets enables you to prioritize certain data when a search is performed on your shop. Here is how: Consider the keyword search term "player". This term is associated with the product "iPod shuffle" in the test store, and is also the name of an example product that we created, called "Walkman example".
- We will show first the search results that has the word "player" in the name of the product. To do this, we will assign to the "Product Name weight" field a value that is worth far more than others. In our case, we are going to write 10 and place the value of field "Tags Weight" at 1. We note therefore that This way, the product with this term in its name that will appear first.
- We take the same term “Player ” "Player" but inverse the values in the fields “Product Name Weight” : "Product Name Weight" thus gets a 1 and “Tags Weight” , and "Tags Weight" gets a 10 .
You have many more factors that you can assign a weight to: short description, category, tags, attributes, etc. You will find that the display order of results is reversed because we changed the weight of the various fields. Fine-tuning these settings will be more visible on a large catalog with many references.
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This tab combines many tools and tips that might help you improve your shop's performance (server-wises, not sales-wise).
Smarty
Smarty is the name of the templating language used by PrestaShop's themes.
- Force compile. Only enable this if you are building a theme, and needed to see your changes at each page reload.
- Cache. Only disable this if you debugging a theme or a plugin for PrestaShop: otherwise, you should probably not touch this.
Combine, Compress and Cache (CCC)
CCC is a set of tools aimed at minimizing server load and theme loading time.
- Smart cache for CSS.
- Smart cache for JavaScript.
- Minify HTML.
- Compress inline JavaScript in HTML.
- High risk HTML compression. It is marked as "high risk" because while the HTML code is very much compressed, it will not respect web-standards anymore. Use it at your own risk: some search engine do not deal well with non-standard-respecting website.
Media servers enable you to redirect part of your traffic (media files, for instance) to other servers under your control, through other domains or sub-domains.
Cyphering
Cyphering means to encrypt data so as to render unreadable to unwanted eyes. Your costumers' account details, as well your own, are protect by cyphering. Here you can choose the algorithm you prefer:
- Rijndael with mcrypt lib. Default choice. Fast and secure.
- custom BlowFish class. Better security, but performance take a toll, as it takes more time to validate the authentication, this for each page load. You customers might appreciate the added security, but might not like the time spent waiting for the page to load.
Ergo, choose wisely.
Caching
Your server's cache stores static versions of your dynamic webpage, in order to server these to your customers and thus reduce server load and compiling time.
This tab enables you to choose to enable caching, and choose the caching method:
- Memcached. A distributed caching system. Very effective, but you need to make sure that your server/host supports it – most probably, if your PHP configuration features the Memcached PECL extension, you're good to go. You can add Memcached servers by clicking on the "Add server" link.
- File system. The static files are simply stored as any other file, on your server. You can indicate the directory depth
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