With this update, ASA2 undergoes a significant improvement in handling product updates. If errors occur in the process, they are logged. The date of the last update attempt is then displayed in red in the list of products. By clicking on the date, the error message is displayed. This increases the transparency for errors during the automatic update.

In addition, two timestamps are now recorded separately from each other. The time of the last update attempt and the time of the last successful data update. This is useful because in previous versions the time of the last update was not refreshed in case of errors and thus error-prone products always remained at the top of the queue of products to be updated. In the worst case, this clogged the queue and other products were never updated.

Improvements for the shops data browser

The data browser for store products has received some improvements. Previously, there was no multiple selection for all displayed products on a page. This is now possible by clicking the checkbox above the first column.

Also, after selecting products, the number of selected products appears above the import button, which is very helpful for overview.

New option for the shortcode asa2_keywords

The new option “select_items” can be very helpful when using the shortcode asa2_keywords. With it, it is possible to selectively display only certain products of the result. By default, the function returns the ten products from the Amazon search. With the already available “limit” option, it was possible to limit the amount seen from the beginning, but not to show, for example, only the first, fifth and tenth product. This is now possible with the select_items=”1,5,10″ option.

Important change

An important change that comes with this update is the removal of the included MaxMind GeoIP2 Country database, which was announced some time ago. As this database has grown in size over the last few years, it is no longer efficient to include it in the ASA2 package. Those who use the internationalization (i18n) feature of ASA2 can integrate this free database themselves and update it more regularly than it was possible in the past with ASA2 updates.

Check the online documentation to learn more.

Template “Robust” with new options

The included template “Robust” now has the options to display the description text and the product features. The description text is unfortunately still not supported by the Amazon PA API, but since you can store a text for each product yourself or other stores provide texts, this extension for the current standard template is very useful.

Many bug fixes

There are also seven bug fixes that come with this update, which you can learn about from the changelog, as always.