This extension replaces the pagination on store category, search and manufacturer/brand pages with endless (infinite) scrolling so that your customer will never have to make additional clicks to see more products. It works just like Google Reader and Bing Image/Video Search.
The added bonus is speed - endless scrolling is much faster than the traditional pagination in OpenCart. For example with 20,000+ products, endless scroller can access items on other pages over 30 times faster than regular pagination would allow. Even with the default OpenCart installation (around 20 products) you already get almost 3 times speed increase on browsing products!
Speed matters - studies show that the more you keep your customer waiting the more likely he/she will ababndon your page.
The extension degrades gracefully to conventional pagination if Javascript is disabled. So users with no JS can still access all the products and search engine crawlers (such as Googlebot, Alexa, Yahoo Slurp and others) still index all your category pages!
For those who do not know, endless scroll (or infinite scrolling or continuous scrolling) is a popular technique among web 2.0 sites, where instead of paging through items using the traditional pagination technique, the page just keeps loading with new items attached to the end.
Version 1.3 implements some of the best practices of endless scrolling to make the user experience even better. It adds an optional "Back to Top" button which can help customers get back top really fast, without having to use the scrollbar or the mouse wheel. Additionally it adds an optional sticky footer which shows the current progress: how much products are being shown currently and what is the total number.
You also have an option to use a "More" button instead of auto loading the pages or together with the auto loading feature, just like Google Image Search does. You can specify how many pages are loaded automatically before the "More" button is displayed. If the customer clicks on the "More" button then another set of auto loads will be performed before the "More" is shown again. The "More" button is a way to let customers reach the footer without having to scroll through all the products. It is useful in cases where the theme has a footer that is not sticky.
Version 1.4 makes the scrolling stateful, so it does not break the back button. You can scroll several pages, then leave the page to view a product for example and when you return to the infinite scrolling page with a back button, you can continue browsing from where you left the page. Furthermore you can scroll to any location, get the current URL from the address bar, open that link in another browser and see the same very same page/product that you were watching in the original browser window. So you can easily share links between other people and link them to the exact same spot that you are. With conventional pagination you could only link to the correct page where the product was, but with this extension you can link to the right product! Works with all major browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera) except IE (IE up to version 9 does not support this feature, maybe IE 10 will)
Note: As replacing the pagination is template specific, the extension will have to be tailored to any custom theme peculiarities. The extension comes with full support for the default theme.
The mod can be found from http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=5678
Main features:
- multilingual
- option to fade in loaded products one by one
- endless scrolling on category, search and manufacturer/brand pages
- much faster than regular pagination
- degrades gracefully to conventional pagination when Javascript is disabled [added in v1.2]
- optional "Back to Top" button [added in v1.3]
- optional "More" button for loading the next page instead of auto loading (so customers can access the footer without having to scroll through all the pages) [added in v1.3]
- optional sticky footer showing current progress [added in v1.3]
- stateful scrolling that preserves the back button functionality [added in v1.4]
Version 1.5.3 is available for OpenCart 1.5.0.x - 1.5.1.x
Live DEMO
Store
Admin (user/password: demo)
A screencast showing how the extension works: http://screencast.com/t/cjlylx2mA
Screencast demonstrating the new features of version 1.3 http://screencast.com/t/t7BWOQYY2
- edit 10.01.2014 - released version 1.7.0 for OpenCart versions 1.5.2+ (new admin module settings page)
- edit 27.07.2013 - released version 1.6.1 for OpenCart versions 1.5.2+ (microscopic improvements)
- edit 07.05.2013 - released version 1.6.0 for OpenCart versions 1.5.2+ (added specials page endless scrolling + some minor fixes)
- edit 04.12.2012 - released version 1.5.3 for OpenCart versions 1.5.x (fixed occasional url corruption)
- edit 23.08.2012 - released version 1.5.2 for OpenCart versions 1.5.x (fixed JS issue)
- edit 22.08.2012 - released version 1.5.1 for OpenCart versions 1.5.x (fixed tiny html layout issue)
- edit 17.06.2012 - released version 1.5.0 for OpenCart versions 1.5.x (added endless scrolling to manufacturer/brand pages)
- edit 04.06.2012 - released version 1.4.3 for OpenCart versions 1.5.x (fixes SEO URL issue)
- edit 24.04.2012 - released version 1.4.2 for OpenCart versions 1.5.x (adds integration support for Custom Image Titles extension)
- edit 01.04.2012 - released version 1.4.1 for OpenCart versions 1.5.x (fixes a pagination issue)
- edit 01.04.2012 - released version 1.4.0 for OpenCart versions 1.5.x (made scrolling stateful)
- edit 30.03.2012 - released version 1.3.0 for OpenCart versions 1.5.x (added endless scroll best practices)
- edit 28.03.2012 - released version 1.2.0 for OpenCart versions 1.5.x (added graceful degradation if Javascript is disabled)
- edit 27.03.2012 - released version 1.1.0 for OpenCart versions 1.5.x (added endless scrolling to search page)
- edit 27.03.2012 - initial release for OpenCart versions 1.5.x
Tags: endless scrolling, infinite scrolling, continuous scrolling, scroller, category product scrolling, search product scrolling, stateful scrolling, preserves back button
