- Task
- Make an OpenCart 4 store with a large catalogue open quickly and support out of the box what Ukraine always needs: Nova Poshta with waybills, Ukrainian payment systems, decent search and structured data — instead of assembling all of it each time from third-party modules of varying quality.
- Solution
- A theme for OpenCart 4.1+ on PHP 8.1+ with its own caching layer (APCu for the object cache, OPcache with JIT, nginx fastcgi_cache, scheduled warm-up of top categories) and a fix for the N+1 problem in categories, where native OpenCart issued 200+ COUNT queries. On top of that a Theme Engine with 10 ready design presets and 200+ options, FULLTEXT search with synonyms and autocomplete, back-in-stock notifications with recovery by email and SMS, reviews with AggregateRating markup, a set of JSON-LD schemas (Organization, WebSite, Product, Breadcrumb, Article, FAQ), and a Ukrainian layer: Nova Poshta with automatic waybills, registers and webhooks, Ukrposhta, LiqPay, monobank, WayForPay. Separately, an order-tracking page and a printable invoice protected by a token. Shipped as five archives: a full installer, a marketplace theme and three standalone modules.
- Result
- An internal test rig on a 14 thousand product catalogue: native OpenCart 4 returns a cold category in 8–17 seconds, with our theme it is 0.18 s from cache and 0.8 s without it — that is 30–95 times faster. The codebase holds 8,157 PHP files, 718 Twig templates and 726 JavaScript files; the feature list runs to 167 items in 16 sections. Version 1.1.0; the product is being prepared for launch and has not been released publicly yet.