Major 3.0 update of Merlin Backoffice ® Flex

Reminder: the full version of Merlin Backoffice FLex ® can be downloaded and used free of charge, with no obligation, for 15 days. 

Over 40 new features or improvements is a lot for a single update. In this article, we've selected only the most significant.
The full list, including the ten or so patches, is available as usual on the version history page.

New feature: Using the mouse to move and associate products with PrestaShop categories

It's almost playful: select your products and simply drag and drop them into one of the category trees, whether to change their main category, associate them with secondary categories (using the Ctrl key) or remove them (using the Alt key).

We've put together a new, very comprehensive video tutorial on the vast subject of relationships between products and categories in PrestaShop, using Merlin Back Office Flex. It covers all the related topics: basic concepts, moving, associating, de-associating, display order, product counters, backward associating, importing, etc. However, at this time it is available in French only.

Categories can also be managed with the mouse

Simply drag and drop to move categories, either within the same tree as below, or between two trees.
Press the Crtl key to duplicate the selected categories in the location of your choice

Much faster

Many operations have been optimised. These include:

• Launch phase, approximately 20% gain
• Calculation and display of product/category associations in the right-hand panel, up to 15 times faster
• Display of categories, according to the columns selected. In particular, category rows without photos.
• Reading and displaying the contents of large CSV files
• Improved product display when no stock column is requested.
• All HTTP requests are now encoded in HTTP2 instead of HTTP1, which is more secure and faster.
• The script for finding and deleting orphaned images is much faster (a single MySQL query instead of one per file). Also deletes fileType files.

Support and compatibility with PrestaShop 9 (currently available in beta version)

• Management of obsolete headings (meta keywords).
• Addition of new headings (redirections for categories).
• New product redirection options added.
• Extension of EAN13 to 20 characters (GTIN).

We've also taken the opportunity to add a number of PrestaShop 8 sections that were previously missing from Merlin Backoffice.

This applies, for example, to ‘In stock’ and ‘Out of stock’ messages on product combinations.

You also now have a second HTML editor for the ‘Additional information’ section of the categories:

Property cloning functions, from one product to others

We have put in place a simple, visual methodology for copying certain properties of a model product en masse to a selection of other products.

This replaces our old collection of cloning modules, saving you €50 per module avoided.

For the moment, this includes cloning associations with carriers, attachments, linked products or accessories, the list of associated categories, the main or default category, keywords (tags) and even features.

A tutorial explaining this methodology is in preparation. Screenshot of the tutorial, using ‘Attached documents’ as an example of a property to be cloned:

Visual identification before deletion and de-association

To avoid any errors when deleting rows in the wrong table, particularly when using the ‘Del’ or ‘Del’ key on the keyboard, the objects that are going to be deleted (whether products, images, declinations, attributes, characteristics or anything else) are surrounded by red frames so that they can be clearly seen, like this:

In the same way, simply hovering over an unlink button shows you the items that will be unlinked, in orange dotted boxes, as in the example below of two products with two carriers:

We hope you won't be surprised if we tell you that it also works the other way round, before combining (blue dotted line) :

For the sake of completeness, this type of highlighting has also been applied to the buttons for activating and deactivating products and categories, in the ‘Grouped actions’ buttons, with blue or orange frames around the boxes that will be checked or unchecked:

he idea behind all this is to help you visually before each critical operation, so that you never make a mistake.

Support for PrestaShop's experimental feature of generating several image formats at the same time (jpg and webp)

As a result, as .webp thumbnails can be created in addition to .jpg thumbnails, the photo deletion and cleaning scripts will also search for and delete them.

Two new pre-filters: see PrestaShop's ‘Orphan or invisible products’ and ‘All products in the database

Lhe options have been there for ages, but now they're finally available.

Merlin Backoffice ® Flex has long been able to identify orphan products (those that do not have a default category) and repair them by attaching them to the category of your choice. But it did this globally and without previewing.

You can now ask it to show you all orphan products, including those that have no associated category (known as ‘invisible’ products), and you can then quickly re-distribute them in appropriate categories using the new mouse-move function..

The other pre-filter allows you to list all the products, without having to select all the categories. This makes it possible to drag and drop certain products into the category of your choice in the left-hand tree to arrange them (this would not be possible if all the categories were selected).

Define the ‘type’ of new products from the outset

It's very useful for defining products as future packs, virtual products or variations, right from the creation phase of new mass-produced products.