Find how nopAccelerate integrates Apache Solr with nopCommerce, how it interact with nopCommerce and improves your nopCommerce store performance.

Applicable to:

• nopAccelerate
• nopAccelerate Search
• nopAccelerate Catalog Navigation
• nopAccelerate CDN

Understanding nopAccelerate Plugins

nopAccelerate is a set of plugins for nopCommerce that integrate Apache Solr with nopCommerce. It adds numbers of features to nopCommerce like blazing fast powerful advanced full text search, autocomplete & search suggestions, and advanced faceted/layered catalog navigation feature. It also makes your nopCommerce store responsive and make it load very fast. The one of the promising advantage of nopAccelerate is, it increases your nopCommerce store capacity to serve more concurrent requests and makes your nopCommerce store very responsive & reliable.

The nopAccelerate may have two or more plugins depending on the edition you’ve purchased.

nopAccelerate Solr Search

nopAccelerate Solr Search is an advanced search plugin for nopCommerce. It enables nopCommerce store to use advanced searching capabilities of the Apache Solr. You can have all the features of Apache Solr deployed to your nopCommerce store. Some of the highlighted features are full-text search, fuzzy search, relevancy rankings, results elevation, stop words, advanced text analysis & language analysis, etc.

nopAccelerate Solr Search consists of two plugins:

1. nopAccelerate Core
2. nopAccelerate Search

nopAccelerate

nopAccelerate is an advanced search and catalog navigation plugin. It includes the features of both nopAccelerate Search & nopAccelerate Solr Navigation. It is a must have nopCommerce plugin for any serious online retailer using nopCommerce.

nopAccelerate Catalog Navigation is an advanced layered / faceted navigation plugin for nopCommerce. Layered navigation allows your visitors to search product by product characteristics. Layered navigation is more user-friendly, faster, and simpler, allowing your site visitors to quickly find the product that corresponds perfectly to his or her needs. They thus won’t lose any time searching and will be quickly satisfied. As a result, they’ll be more likely to make a purchase, and your online sales will grow.

For any e-commerce website; Categories, Price Ranges, Manufacturer & Custom Filters make up of Layered Navigation Constant Filters. Custom Filters can be defined per product and will be displayed on Category Listing Pages to make it easy for your visitor to find products they’re looking for quickly.

For a nopCommerce store, you already have a very decent feature to define Price Range & Custom Filters. Custom Filters can be set using Specification Filters. nopAccelerate Catalog Navigation uses the same details for layered navigation. The difference is the fast response time. nopAccelerate Navigation & nopAccelerate make your catalog navigation pages and layered navigation pages respond very fast because it uses the facets meta-data stored into the Solr indexes instead of database. This makes it a must have advanced layered navigation plugin for a serious retailers using nopCommerce.

Apache Solr is the one of the highly used & recommended open source search engine and powers the faceted navigation catalog of many large internet retailers. It is highly reliable & scalable.

nopAccelerate brings the power of Apache Solr to power your nopCommerce based e-commerce store. You will benefit from improved search and response time of your store. Moreover, it will bring a significant performance optimization to your store by reducing slow database queries being made to the nopCommerce database. Instead, your nopCommerce store will now make make queries to the Solr index which are similar to flat table & responds blazing fast. It also makes your site serve more concurrent requests using the same server infrastructure so you can now grow very quickly. Moreover, with nopCommerce and nopAccelerate, scaling your website is even more easier.

nopAccelerate consists of three plugins:

1. nopAccelerate Core
2. nopAccelerate Search
3. nopAccelerate Catalog Navigation

nopAccelerate CDN

nopAccelerate CDN is a generic CDN plugin that enables your nopCommerce store to use CDN network to load images and other static resources. It is one of the highly recommended Plugin for nopCommerce store that wants to reduce page rendering time drastically.

nopAccelerate CDN rewrite all images URL for Product, Category & Manufacturer Pictures. It also rewrites Nivo Slider Images URL and other Plugin’s Images URL if they’re using nopCommerce Picture Services.

nopAccelerate CDN Plugin makes it very easy to use any CDN network that supports Pull Zone Creation. And you can use multiple hostname to further reduce loading time by parallelizing http requests among multiple CDN hostnames.

nopAccelerate CDN consists of only single Plugin:

1. nopAccelerate CDN

Let us now look into what each of these three plugins do?

nopAccelerate Core

The nopAccelerate Core Plugin is the core / base plugin for integrating Apache Solr with nopCommerce. It fetches products data from nopCommerce database and stores it in Solr’s index. It keep tracks of changes being made to products catalog in nopCommerce and push updates to the Solr at regular interval. It monitors the IDI (Incremental Data Import) process that import products into Solr and make it easy for nopCommerce administrator to manually perform certain operation from within nopCommerce.

nopAccelerate Search

The nopAccelerate Search plugin simply override the search method from the Plugin to perform full-text search using Solr Search Engine. Once enabled, your existing search box will be replaced with the newer search box that utilizes Solr Search instead of nopCommerce Search.

nopAccelerate Catalog Navigation

The nopAccelerate Catalog NAvigation plugin override all the Catalog pages of nopCommerce. It includes Category, Manufacturer and Tags pages. Once enabled, these catalog navigation pages will be served from Solr index instead of nopCommerce database. This also contains the layered / faceted navigation feature being served using Solr’s faceted queries.

nopAccelerate CDN

nopAccelerate CDN plugin override Picture Service of nopCommerce to use given CDN Hostname / URL instead of default Store URL. When provided multiple CDN Hostnames, it tries to use hostname randomly to distribute load among the provided CDN Hostnames.