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Most online stores have a section named ‘featured products’. Your challenge is to make this section truly stand out and get the desired impact. Towards that end, Featured Products is a must-have extension for your store. You can statically or animatedly showcase products of your choice to lure them to explore the features and benefits of your product. As with all of our extensions, you will have considerable flexibility to customize it to any store using our typically clean and intuitive user interface.

Features

For website visitors
Appealing interface with a slideshow feature

• New Slider type display: Give customers a stylish preview of the products to entice them to click through
• Featured products can be in shown 5 different types: the new and highly attractive advanced slideshow, compact slideshow with or w/o bottom text, simple row with or w/o bottom text

Help prospects make informed decisions with Tooltip

• Lead customers in with the right hook- be it a catchy one liner or the most important product attribute

For store admin
Flexible options to display products

• More slideshow and slider behavior control
• You choose what, where and how to display with customizable positioning and layout
• Set the featured products to be displayed in a particular category
• Automate display of featured products:
• option to show certain number of products either by recency of upload or randomly
• ability to restrict such automation to specific category

Increase clickthrough probability with additional information

• Tooltip option
• Alternative product text

Enjoy hassle-free set up and management of a high-value feature

• Define/ re-define product image sizes from the configuration panel
• Employ Different styles of the product buttons: numerical or product thumbnail
• Control the look and feel easily:
• Fully customizable look - just edit a simple CSS to change any color, objects placement and size, round corners etc.
• CSS in a separate .css file - customize it the way you need
• Ready to use CSS presets in the package
• No side libraries, all code is custom and very compact
• Ensure that featured products do get seen by website visitors
• 100% pure JavaScript and CSS, no flash or other embedded content, so your featured products won't be blocked
• Smooth JavaScript animation
• Consumes less processing (CPU) resource

Easy set up, trusted aheadWorks product quality and support

• Easy 2-minute installation
• 100% open source
• 30 day money back – satisfaction guaranteed
• Lifetime bug free guarantee
• Meets Magento programming practices for most versions and customizations compatibility
• Free upgrades at least in current version branch
• Our excellent support team is waiting to hear from you each business day from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm GMT

New features in the latest version

• Ability to add a product to several categories
• Option to display a product featuring in the slideshow only on the main page if desired
• Display of a warning message if no product is found for showcasing as a featured product
• Choice of using a custom (different) image in the featured product slideshow if you do not want to use the product image

How it works
The Featured Products extension adds:

• 3 product attributes - 'aw_fp_enabled', 'aw_fp_category' and 'aw_fp_description'
• A control panel under "system configuration" that lets you configure the view of your extension
• A tab under product configuration options that lets you define the featured products and enter alternate text for the slideshow
• A template, which should be inserted into the store’s CMS on one or more pages where you wish to see your featured products

The template would start rolling after it has been added to a live page and at least one product has been marked as “featured”.

Upgrade
From 1.x to 2.0
The upgrade procedure is the same as installation procedure, except that it would overwrite the old files. You should confirm all file overwrite requests. Please note that after the upgrade your extension may not look like the old one. Adjust the look using variety of controlling options in System->Configuration->aheadWorks Extensions->Featured Products

From 2.0 to 2.1
Please note, that CMS block format has changed since 2.1.
Open CMS blocks/pages you used to slideshow and replace {{block type="catalog/product/aw_featured_products" template="catalog/product/aw_featured_products.phtml"}} with {{block type="featuredproducts/featuredproducts"}} Now you can safely remove old template placed at YOUR/SKIN/DIR/template/catalog/product/aw_featured_products.phtml This is not necessary step but it may be useful to keep the skin clean.

Installation
Clear the store cache under var/cache and all cookies for your store domain. This step eliminates almost all potential problems. It's necessary since Magento uses cache heavily.

1. Backup your store database and web directory
2. Extract the contents of the archive on your computer and navigate inside the extracted Featured_Products-X.X folder.
3. Using your FTP client upload 'app' directory to your store root. Agree with any overwrite prompt.

That's all, the installation is complete now. You can proceed to the Configuration section.

Uninstall

Since Magento does not give ability to handle automatic uninstall for its modules, your need to run the following query on your database manually: DELETE FROM eav_attribute WHERE attribute_code = 'aw_fp_enabled' OR attribute_code = 'aw_fp_description' OR attribute_code = 'aw_fp_category'; This will delete the extension attributes from the database. After that, you can safely remove the files from the extension manager of your store.

Configuration

1. Place the following code in the place(s) where you want featured products to be: {{block type="featuredproducts/featuredproducts"}} Use CMS of your store to for this task. Do NOT insert the line in .phtml files directly.
2. Now, mark some products as featured by going to Catalog > Manage Products > edit a product > Featured. Set "This product is featured" to "Yes". If you enter alternative text - it will be displayed in Advanced Slideshow instead of the original.
3. To configure the extension navigate to System > Configuration > aheadWorks Extensions > Featured Products. Here you can play with different options and look how does it fit your store.
To have more customization options, you can edit the CSS manually. There are some CSS presets in the package located in: skin/default/default/aw_featuredproducts/.presets Just copy all files and folders from selected preset folder to your (replacing all files):skin/default/default/aw_featuredproducts The CSS is located in: skin/frontend/default/default/aw_featuredproducts/css/main.css

Using the extension in a category

To insert the featured products block into a category, do the following:

1. Navigate to Admin > CMS > Static blocks
2. Find the block for your category and click it. If there is no one, create it by clicking "Add new block", then define the block title and identifier, of your choice.
3. Set Status to "Enabled", insert in the Content the following: <p>{{block type="featuredproducts/featuredproducts"}}</p> and save the block
4. Go to Admin > Catalog > Manage Categories, choose your category on the left and find "CMS block" dropdown. Choose the block you've just edited (created) and save the changes.

That's all, after that you should see the Featured Products on this category top. If there is only a white gap then make sure you assigned some products for this category.

Troubleshooting

1. After installing the extension the store gives an error, or blank page, or suggests to start Magento installaton procedure.
   Change the owner of the extracted extension files to the web server user and set 775 permissions on them. Clear the store cache and try again.
2. There is no "aheadWorks extensions" under my configuration section, or after clicking "Feature products" I get a blank page, or "Access Denied" error.
   Clear the store cache, browser cookies, logout and login again.
3. I set up everything correctly, inserted the HTML code but there is nothing on that page.
   Clear the store cache, clear you browser cache and domain cookies and refresh the page.
4. My configuration changes do not appear on the store.
   Clear the store cache, clear you browser cache and domain cookies and refresh the page.
5. I'm getting "Fatal error: Class 'Mage_Featuredproducts_Helper_Data' not found" after module installation. Please start the installation process from the very beginning. Most likely you forgot to clear cache.
6. The title font seems to be misrendered under IE - it has sharp edges and looking unpleasant.
   It's an IE rendering bug - do not use transparent background.
7. My product images are cut, partially visible.
   Narrow the extension container, it doesn't fit your current layout.
8. I see a white rectangle instead of the slideshow.
   Make sure that: a) you added at least a product and b) if the product category is set on "Featured" tab - make sure you are in the correct category. It's better to leave category "--- All ---" for tests.

Legend:
+ New feature
* Bug fix
- Feature removed

2.2.5
+ Magento v.1.4 compatibility
* Wrong button design in Magento v.1.4
* Short PHP open tags removed
* Fixed   symbols in categories selector at backend

2.2.4
+ AW All 2.0 extension integrated

2.2.3
* Import no more crashes with aw_fp_category attribute
* Bundle products displayed with correct price
* Disabled products are not shown now

2.2.2
* Search error bug fix
2.2.1
* Safari unproper JS events handling fix
* Default buttons are like on the demo now
* Some other minor fixes
+ Ability to use any custom image
+ Server-side images processing, now the images load much quicker

2.1
* Completely compatibe with XHTML 1.0 Strict
* All CSS Warnings fixed
* Invisible products are not shown any more
+ One product can be added more to one category
+ Added option to display product outside of categories
+ Shows warning message if no products found
+ CMS block syntax is shorter now
- Dropped support for magento 1.1.x due to layout bugs

2.0
+ Slider mode
+ Completely new visual engine
+ Image/thumbnail auto-scaling under internet explorer
+ Multi-store support
+ Localization-ready
+ Separate CSS file
+ Ready-to use CSS presets
+ Option: show title
+ Option: slider arrows
+ Option: block align
+ Option: container align
+ Option: block dimensions
+ Option: container dimensions
+ Option: rotating interval
+ Option: animation speed
+ Option: show description
+ Option: image align
+ Option: image width
+ Option: thumbnail width
+ Option: switcher type
+ Option: thumbnail zoom ratio
+ Option: show tooltip