If your publication produces editions regularly — daily newspapers, weekly magazines, supplements, and more — your app's storefront can quickly accumulate a very large back catalogue. Today's standard storefront is designed to surface your most recent editions, but it has limits: older editions can drop out of view entirely, and even when they're technically present, scrolling through hundreds of cover images to find a specific issue from two years ago is a suboptimal experience for your readers.

Archive Storefronts is a new way of powering your storefront for exactly this use case. Rather than loading editions from a static feed, it draws on the Pugpig Search index to surface editions on demand, with no ceiling on archive depth. Alongside this, readers get a date filter — so instead of endless scrolling, they can jump straight to a specific year or month and find the edition they're looking for.

How it works

When Archive Storefronts is enabled for your app, any of your storefront tabs can be turned into an Archive tab, whether that's an existing tab or a new one. Your current storefront experience, showing your most recent editions, can remain exactly as it is.

The archive surfaces your any edition types you publish. Each edition is shown as a card with its cover image, title, and publication date.

Importantly, editions in the archive tab are drawn from the Pugpig Search index, not from your OPDS feed. This means editions that have aged out of your standard feed will still appear in the archive, giving readers full access to your back catalogue.

Inside the Archive tab, readers see a grid of edition covers. At the top of the tab, a date filter lets them navigate your catalogue:

• Select a year to see all editions published in that year
• Optionally narrow down further to a specific month

A few important points

• Downloading the editions will be not available in the initial version of the feature. Readers can open and read archive editions, but they cannot download them for offline reading in this initial release. We plan to add offline support in a future update.
• Configuration is handled by Pugpig. You don't need to make any changes to your feed or CMS setup. We add the archive tab to your storefront configuration on our side.

Getting set up

There is nothing you need to change in your CMS, feed, or content workflow. Setup is handled entirely by Pugpig.

To get started:

1. Contact your Customer Success Manager.
2. Pugpig will check whether your editions are indexed in Pugpig Search.
3. Pugpig will add and configure the archive tab in your storefront
   1. Just let us know if you want it as a new or existing filter.

Questions?

If you'd like to know more or discuss whether Archive Storefronts is a good fit for your publication, reach out to your Customer Success Manager or contact us at support@pugpig.com.