ProxiBlue Dynamic Categories Extension - Just-Clothing.co.uk – Review
The problem….
When creating Just-Clothing.co.uk on Magento we wanted to be big, we wanted to list hundreds of thousands of products from many different online stores. This was great, but we soon realised that the difference in categorisation of the products between each of the different suppliers was huge.
Some suppliers were very specific whereas some suppliers kept things very, very generic! So within two weeks of development we had hit a major problem! A problem that could have ended our vision right there and then.
Our research…
Reluctant to give in at such an early stage we took to the web to try and find some sort of solution, we literally spent days scouring the web and tried many different Magento Dynamic Category extensions before we found the ProxiBlue Dynamic Categories Extension. The free extensions we had tested did “OK” but each and every one missed key features, whether it be the ability to run as a cron job, the ability to use multiple criteria or sometimes the extensions were just so slow they were not practical.
The solution…
After trying many free extensions we realised this was not the way to go, so we contacted Lucas at ProxiBlue with a few questions regarding the Dynamic Categories Extension.
We wanted to know its capabilities and whether it could handle what we were looking for. Within no time at all we had a reply to all of our questions and the answers were very reassuring, so we decided to proceed and purchase the Dynamic Categories Extension.
After a very easy checkout process we downloaded the extension and quickly Ftp’d it onto our server, with a quick cache flush, a log out and a log back in again we were ready to go, it really was that simple and our vision for our site was back on track!
The testing…
Eager to get going we started testing the extension and started to realise how powerful it really was.
Setting up a rule was easy, you simple click on a category that you want to assign products to and use a very neat options menu to specify the criteria, such as “Title contains”, “Descriptions contains” etc. You can even add exclusion logic too, which is very handy ….and use regex ….and use attribute values, the list goes on, but you can find all the details in the well-presented documentation thataccompanies the extension. Failing that Lucas was more than helpful in assisting with further questions that we had – and at times we had a lot of questions!
We wanted more…and got it!...
The extension was working brilliantly, doing everything that we could have hoped for, but as you will know things develop quickly. We wanted to now assign attributes to products if they met the criteria we had specified, so we contact Lucas yet again! We explained what we were looking for and he went away to look at the possibilities.
A few days later we were sent a test version of the Dynamic Categories Extension with the new feature added. We uploaded it and it worked perfectly. We now had a powerful extension that could not only categories products within a matter of minutes but would also assign attributes at a lightning fast pace too (we use this for setting attributes like “Colors”, “Size” etc.).
The support…
We have tried and purchased many different plugins and extensions for many platforms and we can honestly say that the support from Lucas at Proxiblue is the best support we have ever received. We have been using the extension on Magento now for many months now and the support is still outstanding. Not only will Lucas advise you on any problems if needed he will even connect to your server and take a look any related problems – in the past this is something we’ve had to buy “Support Packages” for from other suppliers.
Proxiblue Dynamic Categories Extension is an absolutely vital extension for running Just-Clothing.co.uk. Our site simply would not be able to operate without it – the number man hours this extension takes away is huge, we would need a team to be able to manually do what this extension does in minutes. Running the extension via a cron job each night also means that once it’s setup you can just leave it to do what it does overnight and forget about it!
If you have a store with thousands of products, or even hundreds, that need categorising then we cannot recommend this extension enough, you will not find a more suitable extension anywhere else. Join the power of Magento with the Proxiblue Dynamic Categories Extension and you have a very powerful combination, and that’s before you even factor in the superb support from Lucas.
Chris Walsh