The team behind the Jigoshop e-commerce plugin has been working on the upcoming 2.0 release for the past four months. The open source plugin was forked by WooThemes in 2011 to create the early foundation of WooCommerce and has now been downloaded nearly half a million times.
If the 2.0 alpha version is any indication, this release promises to be a major improvement for Jigoshop users in terms of speed. The plugin has been completely rebuilt to include Symfony’s Dependency Injection component, which decreases the impact on loading all of the logic to make everything faster. This also allows developers to override any Jigoshop class, load plugins using autoloading, and insert subpages and tabs for settings in the Jigoshop admin panel.
As a result of the improvements, Jigoshop 2.0 is 3X times faster than 1.x when comparing the performance on common tasks such as browsing product list, adding items to the shopping cart, managing the cart, and placing an order. The team made these speed improvements without using real caching but also plan to make use of memcached and the WordPress’ Transients API to decrease response times even further. Version 2.0 will also include support for modern tools, such as Gulp, Bower, and Composer, to automate tasks and manage dependencies.
The upcoming release also includes a number of improvements to the interface, including a complete revamp of the settings. Automatic saving was added to many fields, both the admin and on the frontend. For example, when adding product attributes, you’ll find that it saves automatically.
The cart and checkout experiences have also been retooled with a more streamlined interface and purchasing process to help encourage users to buy. Individual product pages are sporting a new, more attractive design.
The Jigoshop team is still actively working out a number of features that they would like to see in 2.0, including variables, external and downloadable product types, additional settings, more default payment gateways and shipping methods, coupons implementation and My Account with My Orders pages. They are also creating a transition tool for shops running Jigoshop 1.x, since 2.0 constitutes a major overhaul. If you’d like to help test the alpha release, download the 2.0 Technical Preview 1.
When it’s released it would certainly be interesting to see direct speed comparisons between Jigoshop 2.0, WooCommerce, and other leading e-commerce plugins.