First of all let’s take a quick look at the highly flexible Amasty Layered Navigation itself and bring out it’s main benefits. As they promise – with this extension you will build the ultimate customer shopping experience and boost your store SEO rankings with a feature-rich navigation system. You can also display multiple filter and widgets which makes it easy for the visitor to find what they’re actually after.
What does it mean to the Hyvä theme users? To be able to use the Amasty Layered Navigation extension, we firstly need to make it compatible with Hyvä. Now I am going to stop here and better let’s have a look what the expert has to say.
Interview with the Hyvä developer
1. Why does an extension need to be made compatible with Hyvä?
Since Hyvä is still relatively young project, then most of the extension developers aren’t yet creating their modules for it. Meaning they are still creating the extensions for Luma based themes, which as we know is the default Magento theme. We really hope the extension developers will realize the potential Hyvä has and they are going to provide versions of their modules also for Hyvä.
Meanwhile we’ll have to make these modules compatible ourselves for the clients that decide to go with them. I have to say that it’s only a matter of time until the extension developers realize the great demand for the Hyvä theme.
2. Is it complicated to make it compatible?
Whether it’s complicated or not depends mostly on the certain extension itself. It is pretty much clear what we have to do to make a module compatible. But sometimes the extension is developed in the way that it’s quite hard to understand the code, or it might have lots of features and functionalities that we need to rewrite.
3. Is it possible to do with every extension?
Of course, we can do it with each extension. However, some of them require a lot of work which can be time consuming and therefore sometimes it just doesn’t pay off. Especially, if you can find a different extension from other provider which already accepted Hyvä. By the way – there are more and more of them every day.
4. Now what about the speed of the site – will the extension slow down the shop?
Compatibility module will not slow down the shop. If anything, the shop will work better and perform faster with Hyvä and our compatibility module, than Luma does with its default module made for Luma based themes.
Basically what we do is when we create a compatibility module, we also improve it when it comes to performance. The reason behind it is the same that what makes Hyvä faster than Luma. To find out what it is, read our previous post “Hyvä Theme: the game changer”. 🙂
5. Now did you get some support from Amasty or did we figure it all out ourselves?
Even though their support is great, we don’t get it from Amasty nor any other extension developers, when it comes to making compatibility modules for Hyvä. This, though, is understandable – if they decided to board the Hyvä train, they will make their own modules and then provide support for these.
6. What we did, can this work be used also for other projects?
Of course, our compatibility modules can work on any other Hyvä project, as long as the versions of this specific module are the same. Also, sometimes we need to change our compatibility module when the extension developers publish a new version of their module.
7. How much time did the process take?
Well, when taking into account also the testing phase and code optimization… I’d say about 2 weeks. But don’t forget that this was one of our first modules we made compatible with Hyvä – so the process is going faster now with the new modules.
8. Is there a community place where it’s changed?
Hyvä has a great community. Also, there is an Hyvä compatibility module tracker from where you can find the modules for Hyvä. By the way – the rumour has it that Amasty is considering to join and start making their own modules for Hyvä, but it’s not official, yet. Anyway, we are positive that if not them, someone else will make the modules which do that for Hyvä. Until then, we can always create the compatibility module and use that. 🙂
Get in touch with us!
No doubt our expert made it easier for you to understand all the proccess behind the extension and making it compatible. So now you know who to turn to when your goal is a quicker and better performing webshop and new Amasty Layered Navigation extension. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us we’ll be happy to help you on the joruney.