Broadleaf Commerce gives you a solid kit, but the real fun starts when you stretch it. If you are wrangling promotions, shaping a catalog, or tuning search, this is where the platform pays you back.
Peak season just cooled down, teams are eyeing Spring Boot two, and Elasticsearch is in every hallway chat. Here is a field guide to Extending Broadleaf: Promotions, Catalogs, and Search, written from the trenches.
Promotions in Broadleaf are about rules, qualifiers, and targets. The MVEL rule builder lets merchandisers express business logic fast, but the trick is deciding where offers stack, where they stop, and where to apply price adjustments. Start by modeling a few real promo days, then set combinability and priority so you do not fight ghosts at checkout. When you need company specific behavior, wire an OfferExtensionHandler to veto or tweak discounts, or hook into the Activity that calculates order, item, and fulfillment group offers. Keep an eye on rounding and tax order since small cents drift can wipe out margin at scale. For the admin, add custom fields on Offer with annotations so business users can control blackout dates, stacking flags, or coupon limits without pinging developers, and back it with clear audit notes so support can answer why a shopper got seven dollars off on a Tuesday.
Catalogs live or die on structure. Treat Category, Product, and Sku as separate muscles, then use Product Options for variations that change the Sku like size or color, and attributes for extra flavor that only affects display or search. If you run multi site or multi tenant, lean on shared products with site specific overrides so you are not copying data that will drift. Merchandisers love to move fast, so use sandboxes for safe edits and only promote when the set is green, which also keeps search index jobs predictable. Keep slugs stable and publish redirects when names change, and store marketing text in the catalog instead of a CMS clone to avoid sync pain. For inventory and price, keep truth at Sku level, then let rules and offers shape what the shopper sees, which keeps your math clean when flash sales hit.
Search is where shoppers decide to stay or bounce. Broadleaf ships with Solr, which is battle tested and fast once you tune fields, analyzers, and facets. Start with category, price, brand, and a couple of custom facets that match how your team talks about the catalog, then add a synonyms file that mirrors your support tickets and onsite searches. Index smartly by listening to product change events so you can do partial reindex during the day, and save full rebuilds for quiet hours. Make relevance feel human by boosting exact matches, recent arrivals, and items with strong sell through, and add spell suggestions for the typos we all make on phones. If your shop is betting on Elasticsearch, it is a fine path, just be straight about the work to match the reference Solr setup, and make sure facets and merch rules behave the same so your team is not chasing side effects.
Ship the boring basics first, then extend only where it clearly helps your shopper and your margin.