Vanilo 4.1 has been released with improved orders, links, product search and categorization features.

#Product Search Improvements

The priceGreaterThan, priceLessThan, and priceBetween methods have been added to the ProductSearch class, which has also become Macroable. It means, that you can extend it easily in your application without overriding the class.

See the Laravel Documentation to see how Laravel Macros can be used.

#Links Extended

The Links Module allows you to define relationships between two or more products, variants, taxa or taxonomies.

These are graph-like connections between entries without a having a real graph database and can be used for cross-sell, upsell and recommendation features.

Until Vanilo 4.1, the connection between two entries was always bidirectional. Beginning with 4.1, it is possible to define unidirectional relationships, e.g. "Slim Case" is the accessory of iPhone 13, but the iPhone 13 is not an accessory of Slim Case.

To support these cases, the Links API has been extended with:

• isUnidirectional(), isOmnidirectional() and isEmpty() methods on the LinkGroup class;
• pointsTo() method on the LinkGroupItem class;
• the possibility to retrieve the link items directly as Get::the($type)->linkItems()->of($model) and
• the link_items helper.

It is also possible to force new link group creation using the Establish::new() method.

#Extended Order Totals

To simplify the subtotal calculations, the taxes_total, shipping_total and total attribute getters have been added to the Foundation Order model. They help you to display these subtotals on the storefront without getting your hands dirty with the internals of these calculations.

#New Taxon Content Fields

The following new fields have been added to the Taxon model/table:

• subtitle
• excerpt
• description
• top_content
• bottom_content

These fields can be used to enrich the specific category pages, mega menus and other areas where the taxon is displayed on the StoreFront.

#Admin Improvements

It is now possible, to create, edit and delete links between products:

#Misc Improvements

• Added the discountable shipping fee calculator;
• Added support for configurable decimal separator used by the format_price() helper function

For the full list of changes, see the Vanilo 4.1 Changelog