What's New
We're constantly adding new features and making improvements to SetSeed, so stay tuned for some exciting updates
Our Auto-Shop Import Tool for eCommerce
One of the coolest features we added to SetSeed last year was the auto-shop import tool.
It's a particularly powerful feature because it allows a spreadsheet of products to be turned into a fully-fledged online store in one simple process.
But there's also an interesting bigger-picture story about the auto-shop feature itself. You see, SetSeed has always been about 'pages' first and foremost. We've avoided using 'templates' for content as we think a page should be a blank canvas for content creators to add to as they see fit. Templates for content tend to just be another kind of limitation that will inevitably require some kind of override along the way.
For this reason, we've avoided creating an online store that forces you to build each product page with the same layout, instead favoring tools that let you have full control over all content on the page and then insert the product-specific part with a widget that displays essentially just the 'add to basket' button.
This served our end users well, but of course, the reality is some online stores are just too big for this to work for and require automation and repeating templates.
Since we rebuilt SetSeed with a powerful 'inner template' framework that is perfect for this kind of thing, it was fairly straightforward to create a system that allows for an online store to be built from discrete values without needing to use the rich content editor.
The key thing here is that the whole auto-shop system is in fact simply just an example of a custom feature that any developer using SetSeed could build themselves. If something about our built-in auto-shop system isn't quite what is needed, a developer could simply duplicate the file and create their own version of it.
And going back to where this post started, that means the new import tool also works with any kind of inner template widget too, not just the auto-shop.
It's a beautifully simple tool that lets anyone upload a spreadsheet and map columns to the custom fields defined in the widget properties; then each row gets turned into a page.
It's also a delightful feature in terms of functionality as well as aesthetic and one that perfectly illustrates just how reusable so much of our framework is.