Firstly, this is a great forum, I am impressed by the efforts the developers and community have put into it. But as much as tireless unselfishness abound in these forums, accessible up-to-date documentation and walktroughs are scarce. While waiting for wizards to provide the community with full-fledged tutorials – like kongondos on Wayfinder – or Amazon to flow over with Revolutionary literature, any comprehensive instruction on modx methods will be invaluable for newcomers, non-programmers and the future user base.
This should be an easy one:
A fictious company
Ascetic needs a catalog website. The target markets are US and France.
As the company name implies they crave only two web pages:
Products and
About us. They need them in English and in French.
Under products they list their merchandise: T-shirts (oh, that’s inventive).
They have two models: Long sleeve and Short sleeve.
Long sleeve comes in small, medium and large, as does Short sleeve.
Long sleeve (all sizes) comes in red or blue.
Short sleeve (all sizes) comes in blue or white.
Long sleeves are $15 or €11,40
Short sleeves are $10 or €7,60
The Product attributes:
- Product type (Long sleeve, Short sleeve) candidate for main article documents?
Shared per Product type:
- Category (indoor, outdoor) long sleeve is categorized as indoor AND outdoor, short as indoor only
- List Price (All long sleeves are $15 regardless of color)
- Full view image (default for all types are blue)
- Detail image 1 (detail image presented in blue regardless of article color)
Localized per Product type (i.e. in English as well as in French)
- Caption
- Description
- Calculated price (e.g. price in € from currency conversion)
Unique per article
- Article no.
- Size & color combo
- Custom full view image (when you click on/choose "red", the image switches to the red t-shirt)
- Stock
I hope you don’t find this scenario far fetched or simplified, it is meant to target real life needs as well as common MODx features. It is a combo of the challenges of a multilanguage site (how to setup one document tree per language without shared content becoming redundant; conditional TV:s?) and the most basic ones of e-commerce and separation of presentation and business logic (avoiding the dreaded 5000 doc limit and caching problems by using TV:s for granular options).
I have spent some time trying to get a grip of how to combine methods outlined in different threads & wikis, but to no avail.
There seems to be quite a consensus that the best approach to a multilingual site is "the parallell document tree method", so we have:
Products
–T-shirts
––Long sleeve
––Short sleeve
About us
Produits
-T-shirts
––Manches longues
––Manches courtes
Qui sommes-nous?
This multilanguage part is covered in detail, for example in:
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,10807.0.html
It is also obvious in many threads that using one document per product in a catalog is not ideal for scalability, but nonetheless mostly recommended since it facilitates the use of standard MODx presentation methods. A combination of documents and values from a dedicated table/TV:s is often mentioned (e.g. by ZAP) but I haven’t yet seen it explained for a layman.
What then would be your (pre-Revolution) solution to combine the above?
(thank you for reading this far!)
