Smart Collections

A normal category is filled by hand. A collection category is filled by rules and kept up to date: products that start to match are added, products that stop matching are removed. For your shoppers it is a normal category with filters, SEO URL and menu entry.

No. It only adds additional category links and removes only the links it created. Main categories and links you made yourself are never changed.

It still matches the rules, so the next sync added it again. Add it to Excluded products of the collection instead.

Pinned products and the chosen sort order are written to the product positions of the category. Sort the category by position (the store's default sorting, or the shopper's choice) to show it in that order. Blocks with the Smart collection filling always use the collection order.

When you save a product in the admin panel it is checked at the end of the same request. Collections with a product limit (top N) and time-based rules are refreshed by the scheduled sync (every 15 minutes with the recommended cron job, otherwise at most every 10 minutes after an admin page view) and fully re-synced at least once a day.

Yes. The rules run as one indexed SQL query per collection and every run changes at most the configured number of links per collection, continuing on the next run. In our tests a collection of 12,000 products was evaluated in under 0.1 seconds and fully linked in three runs of 5,000 changes.

Yes. Collection categories are core category pages, and the block filling is cached like other product blocks; both are refreshed when the collection changes. Storefront visits never write to the database.

Yes. Set Active from and Active until. Outside the dates the collection is empty and, if you tick Hide the category while inactive, its category is hidden too.

Not in this version. The marketplace administrator manages collections and can limit them to vendors with the Vendor rule.

Use Clear links and disable on a collection, or uninstall the add-on: uninstalling removes every link it created. Categories stay and can be deleted in Products → Categories.

Open Add-ons → Manage add-ons → Smart Collections → Settings → License. The status line says what is wrong: no key, a key for another add-on, a revoked license, or a domain that the license does not cover. Fix it and click Check now. See License.

Yes. Subdomains of your licensed domain (for example staging.yourstore.com) and local development hosts (localhost, private IP addresses, .local, .test) are covered by the same license.

Nothing changes for 14 days: the add-on keeps working and retries every hour. Only if no check succeeds for 14 days is it switched off until the next successful check.

No. The check runs in the admin panel or from cron, once a day. The storefront never runs it.