diary of a noob, part 3

This post doesn’t require reply, it is merely a tool to keep me on track and to document what I’m doing so others might learn from it possibly? Stream of consciousness. Feel free to surf it. Thank you in advance however if you do want to comment, it is much welcomed and deeply appreciated.

so today I’m trying to get my head round my first FoxyCart site. Very tired, totally scattered, hence my post.

dev link here:

http://smokymtguitars.com/build/

soundtrack for the project:
iTunes radio, absolute Blues hits, http://1club.fm, mostly because I just can’t deal with bluegrass even though these are crazy bluegrass guitars. Also listening to Santana radio.


MODx version: 1.0.1 (yes I have finally gone there)

I have CSS issues, I know this. Will fix once I install more Stuff.

Goals:
1. Install eForm on the about page <---not painful
2. Make dropdown menu chunk for Wayfinder <---- moderately painful but not bad.
3. Install EZFAQ <----lovely
This one might be a bit tricky because I want multiple FAQ categories, but I’ll figure it out.

4. This is the big one. Integrate MODx with FoxyCart and make it so the items can be in more than one category. I’ve downloaded moxiecart and am looking at it. Also looking at Foxyback but it makes me nervous. Am going to eval and report. Already have the item detail template and category/main template made and have some vague hope of accomplishing what I need to merely with Ditto. Trying to wrap my head around PHx and also Maxigallery to see if they will be useful to me here. I’d like to maybe use maxigallery’s pretty functionality for the product pictures. I know I’ve seen posts on it, will report those when I re-find them. The New Arrivals need to go on the home page as well as in their category but they also need to go in the main menu. Tricky.
5. Install search functionality.
6. Last but not least I heard there was some native Google analytics integration somewhere in this version? was that a groundless rumor? am going to find out.

k, thats it for now, I feel much less scattered already. As always, thank you, MODx team, for all your hard work.

Task one: Looking for the form snippet I need....eForm, that is it.

for fellow noobs, the instructions on using this are here in the wiki:
http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/EForm ..I don’t have to install it because it ships installed in v1.0.x. I have saved former chunks into little text files in my modx folder on my desktop, opening those I’m going to make my chunks first and add my snippet call to my page. I need to make a form chunk, a report chunk and a thanks chunk. I also make a little TV called eFormData that I place directly into my template. This allows the client to change the parameters of the form (who it is sent to, etc) without letting them touch my templates.
fixed my css issues (I think) , that was the hardest part of this...

and I’m breaking for dinner and then on to task two.

4. This is the big one. Integrate MODx with FoxyCart and make it so the items can be in more than one category. I’ve downloaded moxiecart and am looking at it. Also looking at Foxyback but it makes me nervous. Am going to eval and report. Already have the item detail template and category/main template made and have some vague hope of accomplishing what I need to merely with Ditto. Trying to wrap my head around PHx and also Maxigallery to see if they will be useful to me here. I’d like to maybe use maxigallery’s pretty functionality for the product pictures. I know I’ve seen posts on it, will report those when I re-find them. The New Arrivals need to go on the home page as well as in their category but they also need to go in the main menu. Tricky.

If you really need products in multiple categories (like a guitar that’s also a resonator and used) you may want to abandon hierarchical categorization and instead use a TV with multiple checkboxes. (For bonus points, set the TV value to an @SELECT binding so it’s easier to add or change the options.) So kind of like tagging rather than categorization.

That’d give you a lot more flexibility, and it’s pretty easy to list what you want using Ditto’s filters or tagging extender.

New arrivals could be a separate TV or you could just use Ditto to pull the most recent additions, depending on how much control you need.

Just some thoughts, as I’ve been down this road many times and without symlinks in MODx it’s definitely trickier to get a single document into multiple categories.

You could also look a the ManagerManager tagging widget for the multi-categories thing which works quite nicely. Why 1.0.1 instead of 1.0.2?

cause when I started this 1.0.2 wasn’t available. This has been one of those start and stop things. I’ll upgrade it. Will add it to my task list. thanks. honestly I knew I needed to, was just in denial. I admit it. My to-do list sends me there a lot.



"Abandon hierarchal categorization" ?

okay, please forgive me, but how do I do that? would it matter if the products were all in "category" containers? I thought about looking at the products like blog posts and tagging them, but then I get a little fuzzy as to -how- Right now I have my main category docs. Rez guitars, Banjos, Mandolins, Guitars and Vintage. Those are containers. I figure I can put the items in the proper container but then also tag them so if they need to be in a different category (new arrivals) or more than one, they will also come up there? The only thing is... don’t know if this makes sense, I’m thinking that ...say guitars is a container doc but new arrivals is just a tag, can I mix queries? KWIM? do they all have to be tags? or maybe I should just throw them all in a "products" bucket container and then just have the TV checkboxes? does it matter?

@SELECT binding. will look that up. thank you.

will look at the ManagerManager tagging widget. thank you.

I’m on to upgrade my install and then work on the dropdowns, task 2.

version 1.0.2 installed.



dropdown menus coded, need to browser test. I have made it as simple as possible for now because I am unsure how I’m going to implement the categories in the shop area.

on to task #3, the ezFAQ

Quote from: redtoad at Mar 03, 2010, 01:00 PM

version 1.0.2 installed.



dropdown menus coded, need to browser test. I have made it as simple as possible for now because I am unsure how I’m going to implement the categories in the shop area.

on to task #3, the ezFAQ

It’s EZfaq, but don’t feel bad, I get it wrong about a third of the time myself.

sorry!!

okay, I needed to make multiple categories for my FAQ.

I tried my normal hand-coded trick which is to have multiple divs and toggle the display:none and display:block variable using javascript on a link. This apparently confuzzled the EZfaq script which -also- uses javascript. And more than one instance of EZfaq on a page is a no go.

so then I thought about bindings. Read all about them and couldn’t figure out how to use them here. Tried a few things. I’m sure there is a way to do this easier than what I did. But what I ended up doing was making a container for FAQ, called, oddly enough...FAQ, it appears in the main menu. It had the first category of FAQs, with a child resource to put my Qs & As in. This resource is not published and does not show in menu, it contains questions about Instruments, has a blank template.

Then I made a child resource container under that for the next category of Q’s, About Shipping. It is just like the FAQ but is a child resource. It has the same template. But it does not show in menu, but is published. Under it is my Q & A’s for this category. Again not published, not shown in menu, blank template.

Rinse repeat for all categories.

then for my submenu, I just made a static html menu with the appropriate id links, each page links to the corresponding "top" faq page. It looks like this:



it works.

Normally I’d query a database to get the Qs and As. I feel stupid not being able to wrap my head around this. Read about how snippets function and think I understand that but still don’t get how else to do this. Oh well.

will use the manager manager to hide the pages I do not want the client to touch... and move on.

That’s basically how I did it for the multiple FAQs at Bob’s Guides except that I made the FAQ pages children of the FAQ container document and I made the unpublished FAQ content pages each a child of its respective FAQ page. That way the FAQ pages show up in a regular Wayfinder menu.

If you’d like them all on one page, there’s another way to go, which is to list all the Q:s and A:s but put an anchor/Title at the head of each section and a menu at the top to jump to them.

I think your way is cleaner, though.

A little relieved. If the Creator did it this way, I’m okay then!! Thanks Bob!!

I’m styling the FAQs to fit with my design today and then moving on to the next task, the scary one... FoxyCart integration. I have my real programmer here today though, yay me.

will report on progress as we make it.