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wich is the best way to make a product catalogue?

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    luuuciano Reply #1, 17 years, 2 months ago
    Hi!

    Maybe I need to do a website for a bycicle reseller... so, he will want to show some products... (not for sale using the website, just to show the products, with descriptions, and prices, etc...)

    but... wich is the best way to make it simple and easily updatable?


    I was thinking on using maxigallery, so you have all the products in the same page (for edition), not 1 document for each product... but I need "big" descriptions (big, more than 4 or 5 paragraph, line breaks, etc)
    and a pagination system (to not have 150 products in one page...)

    Any idea?


    regards, and sorry for the bad english smiley

    luciano
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      jisaac Reply #2, 17 years, 1 month ago
      I have the same situation and would like an easy to use solution. I am not an expert with databases by any means so I could use the help.
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        anonymized-26931 Reply #3, 17 years, 1 month ago
        Hi there,

        i would make 1 product per page and list it using Ditto.

        you could use Ditto filters to show the list accordingly to different specifications (brands etc.) + you’ve got the pagination

        another possibility would be tvExplorer to make your products better searcheable:
        http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,16456.0.html

        hope that helps, j
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          jisaac Reply #4, 17 years, 1 month ago
          That seems like such a cumbersome way to do that. What I would love to do is set up a spreadsheet that I will later upload to my database, the spreadsheet to format something like this:

          [table][tr][td]ID[/td][td]Part Number[/td][td]Product Name[/td][td]Product Description[/td][td]Path to Image[/td][td]Product Family[/td][td]Product Group[/td][td]Series[/td][td][/td][/tr][/table]
          [table][tr][td]69[/td][td]000-00-0001[/td][td]Nice shirt[/td][td]This is a great shirt - buy it[/td][td]image/nice-shirt.jpg[/td][td]Clothes[/td][td]Tops[/td][td]Cheap shirts[/td][/tr][/table]

          Then I would like a way to pull this information into the body of a page - maybe have multiple way of presenting the information (templates). Is there a good solution for this? Appreciate the advice, hopefully this will point others in the right direction as well.

          -J.
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            bunk58 Reply #5, 17 years, 1 month ago
            If you don’t mind writing your own code to display the info on the page look at this wiki article on using a custom table and retrieving the date.
            Also there is a fast upload from CSV snippet somewhere.
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              jisaac Reply #6, 17 years, 1 month ago
              I’m going to look into this, I am not proficient with PHP so that leaves me a little worrisome. There is always a first time for everything.

              If there were a plug in that could handle something like this I believe it would be highly useful. We are not talking a shopping cart, but perhaps a very stripped down way to present products or information.
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                Paulp Reply #7, 17 years, 1 month ago
                Not sure what your actually after but if it’s just displaying products with details ( like this site built in modx for a client http://www.jrwebster.co.uk/index.php?id=82 ) I can walk you through it using ditto and template variables, once set up really easy to add products.

                Let me know
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                  luuuciano Reply #8, 17 years, 1 month ago
                  paulp, each product is a "document" in the backend?
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                    Paulp Reply #9, 17 years, 1 month ago
                    Yep,

                    It’s as simple as that, you just create your tv’s ( IE: image, title etc ) and assign them to your template, then create a chunk which pulls in the TV’s, then use a ditto call to get each document under the page.

                    Example Chunk: 
                    <div class="specials">
<ul>
<li>[+code+]</li>
<li class="title">[+desc+]</li>
<li>Stock No: [+stock_number+]</li>
<li class="price">£[+price+] Each</li>
</ul>
<img src="[+image+]" alt="[+desc+]" />
<div style="clear: both;"> </div>
</div>


                    Ditto call: 

                    [[Ditto? &tpl=`jan` &parents=`502` &paginate=`1` &paginateAlwaysShowLinks=`0` &summarize=`10` &sortBy=`pub_date` &sortDir=`asc`]]


                    Then just style it as needed, change the &parents to the number of the document you will be creating the products under and the &tpl to the name of the chunk you created.
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                      MulaG Reply #10, 17 years ago

                      Does that mean if my client had say 700 images on her site I would need a document for each one? If the client wanted to add another product I’m guessing this wouldn’t be something that would be simple?