We are pleased to announce the Enhanced Category Products extension for Magento 1 (Magento 2 support is not available at this time). This extension provides a new interface to manage positioning of items in a category, making it faster and easier to merchandise products.
To reorder products with the Enhanced Category Products extension (ECP) you can simply drag and drop products around in a grid, or use quick access buttons to move products to the front or back of the list. Each product is displayed with its image and basic properties such as price and stock on hand, to give you the information needed for merchandising. You can even filter products and use an auto-sort to do most of the heavy lifting for you.
ECP is an alternative to the Visual Merchandiser extension which is included in Magento Commerce (formerly Enterprise Edition). We discovered that many users of that Visual Merchandiser extension had trouble getting it to work as expected. The interface was confusing and categories would frequently not be updated to be consistent with the state shown by the extension. We've solved these problems in ECP by using existing Magento code and interface standards, and not attempting to add in our own index and cache systems.
The extension is available for sale now on our website, with documentation on how to use it available from within your account once the extension has been purchased.