Creating a products page dynamically

I am building an ecommerce site for a jewelry shop and I am trying to find a way to use MODx and an ecommerce add-on to fulfill this project.
It will be your typical jewelry site where you choose what type of jewelry you want and you see a list of items, click on an item and you get more detail. I scoured this forum for someone who has a similar site but can’t find one.

Using the Zales site as an example, can MODx plus an add-on create a page like this dynamically:
http://www.zales.com/family/index.jsp?categoryId=3280862

You would see the list of items paginated, you click on one of the items and you see more detail.
I wouldn’t want to have to create the page with the items hard-coded onto the page.

This was my thinking:
A page is created called Wedding Bands. Under that page, I create a page for each product I want to sell and place all the pertinent information into Template Variables (size options, colors, price, picture, tags ...)
A snippet is created and placed in the body of the Wedding Bands page that would look within it’s children and pull in certain TVs, lay them out on the page and paginate if they exceed a preset number.

The other function I would like would be the ability to create a products page just by searching for tags (wedding band, gold ring, diamond...) This would search all pages for results and present them in the same fashion as the Zales example above.

Any help with this is greatly appreciated.

Ditto is your friend to start.

Thanks for the link rthrash. I’ll start digesting Ditto and see what I can find.

Do you know of a site that already does this? I’d love to see a working example of it to make sure I’m not barking up the wrong tree. I need to pass this off to my client who isn’t that computer savvy so the easier I can make it the better.

Thanks!

Many sites use this method with different objectives, it is basically the same as a portfolio page or blog index. Ditto can filter by tags and can filter by parent, so you can get all of the ’index’ pages working with Ditto no problem. The rest of your plan is correct, parent sections , child products, tvs for product details... Will this include ecommerce integration or just catalog?

Quote from: mikeysweet at Mar 31, 2009, 10:29 PM

The other function I would like would be the ability to create a products page just by searching for tags (wedding band, gold ring, diamond...) This would search all pages for results and present them in the same fashion as the Zales example above.

tvExplorer may help with this part.

dev_cw - Originally, this was just going to be a catalog but since I have to put in all the footwork for an eCommerce, i figured i’d go all the way and ecommerce the site.

bob1000 - i will definitely look into the tvExplorer - thx

I also encountered an interesting looking add-on called ’Tableau’: http://modxcms.com/extras.html?view=package/view&repository=10&package=445

Perhaps it might be useful for you...