Managing New Items on a Zen Cart

The New Products view can be a mixed blessing in Zen Cart.
Of course you want to showcase new items to your customers - but what exactly defines "new"?
There are a few places to set this up in Zen Cart

1)The default ordering for products in the New Products list is set in Configuration > New Listing > Default Sort Order to Newest Products first
(but this can be changed to other sort orders)

2) The window of "new-ness" so to speak is defined in
Configuration > Maximum Values > New Product Listing Limited to.....

Products can be deemed to be new from 7 days old, a month old, 120 days old or always

*Beware however if you are using a batch upload facility to import new products (such as EasyPopulate) as I have found that it sometimes doesn't add a timestamp to the products. This gives distinctly odd results in the New Items page. This should be able to be resolved by adding the column 'v_date_added' to the batch import and hardcoding the product added date that way