I'm working on a way to make it simple for customers to see what's new in my shop. Right now, I am able to just update my featured items with whatever is newest, but SCCP forces the order to be based on the order of my categories, meaning the bottom category will always show items at the bottom of the page. Is there any way to reorder this based on when the product was first added or last updated? Maybe a javascript or Jquery? I don't know how to code either of them, so any help would be appreciated!

I'm not sure on how you'd do it outside of the program, but what I did a while back was to only check the new items for the featured items so that all the items that showed on the home page were "only" the new items. Although the flag is featured items, you can use that feature for anything you want. What I did was on my home page I made a Title line above where the featured items would show up and I called it:

Check Below to See What's Been Newly Added

That way the browsers knew those were the new items. Granted, you have to swap them out a lot, but it worked pretty well for me.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I did. I'm trying to see if there is a way to order them from newest at the top to oldest at the bottom. You can see what I've done at the below. Right now, the order it shows is based on the order of my categories. Any thoughts?

My website (recently updated!): craftysmiths.com

Wish I had some info for ya on this one, I don't think there's a way to do what you want. Only way I can see is to edit your category order which would be silly and tedious and mess up your listings in search engines.

I would love to see CC add the ability to setup any type of system we want for this so we can create multiple areas with things like this so you could do a split top part being newest and bottom part being still new stuff. Unfortunately it's a one shot deal right now. Only thing I can suggest is what you're already doing and remove the things that aren't the newest and time your additions so they are practical. In other words if you only have 1 new thing, just add it to the list, if you have 10 new things, take what's on the list currently off and then just add the 10 things. Keeps it fresh.

Another option for now is to alternate between New items and Featured items. Maybe once in a while when you don't have a lot of new things or any new things to add, setup things for featured instead of New items. Then when you get in a bunch of new items, change the page to reflect New items instead of featured. Something to keep your pages changing as well as featuring items periodically.

Let us know if you find any other way to do this.

Oh By the way, one thing I did forget. When I had a shop up a bunch of years back, I created my home page outside of the shop software. This gave me the ability to put whatever products in whatever order I wanted on the page. So what I did was put Featured items on the Shop Home page, and New items on the main Home page. Maybe you might want to consider that? It's not too hard to setup a page and you can make it look pretty similar to your shop without too much hassle I'm sure.

This would give you full reign over what order your new items are in