Product Checks

The Product Checks for Shop module (product-checks-for-shop) is a private notebook for shop staff: a per-product record of when each part of a listing was last given a proper look, and a list of which products have gone longest without one. Shoppers never see any of it.

It is a custom module hosted in the site owner's own GitHub account rather than the module directory - see Authoring a module for how that works. It requires the Shop and Shop Variations modules.

What it records

Twelve aspects per product, each with its own last-checked date:

Title, Short description, Long description, Images, 3D models, Variations, Add-ons, Add-on models, Downloads, Specification, Shipping, Categories and tags.

Add-on models is the separate one worth explaining: an add-on a shopper bolts on - a pedestal, a screen - carries its own 3D model, and it can be wrong long after the product's own model is fine. Categories and tags covers where the listing actually sits in the shop, which is the sort of thing that quietly drifts as the catalogue grows.

Plus one notes box per product, shared across all twelve - a place for "waiting on supplier photography" rather than a diary.

A check older than six months counts as stale, on the product page and the product tile alike. The admin list can be switched to a tighter or looser window just for the view you are looking at. Every save records who saved it.

Where it appears

On the product page (staff only)

A quiet one-line strip - Checks: 7/12 current, oldest 4 months - that expands on click to the full grid: each aspect shows its date (or "never"), a tick button stamps today, and a date picker backdates. Save is explicit, and its outcome is shown.

Only signed-in staff with the shop products permission ever see the strip. Everyone else gets exactly the page they always did - the strip renders empty for all visitors and only fills itself in once the site has confirmed who is looking, so cached pages can never leak it.

Placing it: the strip is a page-builder block. In Admin → Layouts → Shop → Product Detail, drag Shop: Product checks to where you want it - typically at the top, above the gallery and buy column. It can be moved or removed at any time like any other block. If you uninstall the module, remove the block from the layout first (a leftover block renders nothing, but there is no sense leaving it lying about).

On a product tile (staff only)

A compact tick list on the product card itself, so a member of staff walking a category page can see which listings still need work without opening any of them. It shows a Checks 7/12 heading, then every aspect with a green tick or a red cross - a cross meaning never checked, or checked longer ago than six months - and finally, centred underneath, whether the product carries a note. The note line reads the other way round: a note is something outstanding, so having one is the cross and an empty box is the tick. Hover it to read the note, and hover an aspect for its age.

Same privacy as the product-page strip: it renders empty for everyone and only fills itself in once the site has confirmed who is looking, so a cached category page can never leak it to a shopper. A whole grid's worth of tiles is looked up in one go rather than one request per tile, and a very large category

• a few hundred listings on one page - is looked up in a couple of goes rather than one. Grids that size used to come back with no ticks at all.

Asking "who is looking" costs a shopper one quiet question per visit and then nothing further, and their browser is no longer told off for asking. It used to be answered with a refusal, which browsers treat as an error worth complaining about - so every shopper on every category page collected a red line in the developer console for something entirely routine. Nothing about what staff see has changed.

Placing it: in Admin → Layouts → Shop → Product Card, drag Card: Product checks to where you want it - under the price is the natural home.

In the product editor

A Checks section in the admin product editor, alongside Downloads and Add-ons - the same grid, already expanded, for updating while you edit.

Admin → Shop → Catalogue → Checks

The working list, as a tab on the Catalogue page beside Products, Categories and Collections rather than a link of its own in the sidebar - it is a view of the catalogue, so it sits with the rest of it.

Every catalogue product, the longest-unchecked first until you say otherwise. Hidden variation children and archived products are left out.

Each row shows the product's picture and SKU, twelve small squares (one per aspect: filled green means current, amber means checked but out of date, an empty dashed square means never checked), how many are current out of twelve, the age of the oldest check, the first line of any note, and who last saved. Hover a square for that aspect's age; click it to mark that aspect checked today without opening anything. The arrow at the end of a row opens the full grid inline, where dates can be backdated and the note edited.

Counting along the top are six tiles - everything in view, all checks done, checks outstanding, never checked, gone out of date, and carrying a note. Each one is a button that filters the list to it. Under them is a chip per aspect with how many products still want that aspect looked at; clicking one narrows the list to exactly those products, so "which listings still have no 3D models" is one click.

Filtering: search by name, slug or SKU; by product status; by category (which follows sub-categories down the tree); by whether the checks are done or not; by a single aspect being done, not done, never checked or out of date; and by whether the product carries a note. There is also a "current for" choice - three months, six months or a year - which decides what counts as still in date for the view you are looking at, without changing anything saved.

Sorting: longest unchecked first or last, fewest checks done first or most, notes first or last, recently saved first or longest since saved, and name either way. The column headings sort too - click one, click it again to turn it round.

Doing several at once: tick the boxes down the left, choose an aspect (or "Every check") in the bar that appears, and mark them all checked today. The same bar can clear those dates back to never, which asks first.

Export CSV hands you whatever the filters currently show as a spreadsheet - handy for giving somebody a morning's worth of checking on paper.

The view lives in the address bar, so a filtered, sorted list is a link you can send to whoever is doing the checking, and a refresh lands you back on it.

Installing it

The module needs a core new enough to install modules by URL, and the site's GitHub App granted access to the module's (private) repository. Then: Admin → Modules → Add a custom module, paste the repository URL, Install. The module's database table is created on the deploy that follows.