Template Variable, Options, and Attributes

I am really not sure how to title this. I don’t think this is specifically an ecommerce question, more of a best practice question.

I want to create options for a shopping cart. For example I want to sell shirts. I have Men’s Short Sleeve and I want to have a image of a shirt and you click on the short sleeve image and you can choose options for color and size. Not too bad, but now I want to keep track of inventory and hide the options that are sold out. I can not just store the number of short sleeve shirts, I need to store the number of small, green shirts and the number of large green shirts, large red, small blue, medium blue, etc... One way I thought of was to create a Template Variable for each color and use a string of comma separated counts of the sizes ( [13,5,8] for the number of Small, Medium, and Large). It is more likely that I would need to add a new color than to add a new size. Would the backend editor be confused by this? Would is be difficult to export and import?

I am hoping I can manage and manipulate the data enough to use it with Shopkeeper (I guess) since it seems the only option at this time. Ewcid doesn’t support this option. I wish Shopkeeper had Ewcid backend options for shipping and payment processing.

Any better way to handle the variables? Any better way to do ecommerce with MODx?

Has anyone done anything similar?

My recommendation is to create a custom data model to store your catalog/inventory and create a few views with snippets to render the data. Though you could do this with Template Variables, IMO, it is not what the intention of Template Variables are. They are variables to help organize your presentation layer, not the data your are trying to present.

Jason,

Do you know of any modules that are available that would help with creating data tables? I have added custom table to MODx in the past, but I have done it manually. It would be nice to be able to have a module that you can use to create, modify, export and import custom tables. I am more comfortable with doing design and using the MODx manager, than using the command line.

Do you know of any modules that are available that would help with creating data tables? I have added custom table to MODx in the past, but I have done it manually. It would be nice to be able to have a module that you can use to create, modify, export and import custom tables. I am more comfortable with doing design and using the MODx manager, than using the command line.

Hi bwente,

see this thread: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,44426.msg266285.html#msg266285

Thanks for the link. I got dbedit installed and works pretty well. I just wish there was a disconnect for the backend user. You have to go to to different areas to edit a doucment/resource/product.