Product Information and Search - surely there must be a way?

[NickD]

I've inherited a site and am trying to make some improvements. I come from other ecommerce systems and at the moment in Actinic I am trying all sorts of ways and finding none that work to achieve what seems like basic functionality to me. The site has been on Actinic for a long time so it is possible many old workarounds and tricks are still on that have a proper solution by now. At least that was my hope, but in 2 weeks of trying and looking around these forums I'm still turning in circles on some of the questions. This is one of them.

Mainly I would like to take key product information out of the description text and into custom structured attributes, so it can be used for search and perhaps for automated cross browsing (more products with the same ...) Having a good structure of attributes means the content can be repurposed in different ways on different pages, for example for a small mobile screen or to generate a pdf catalogue.

But as I moved my content to different structured pieces, the content has been disappearing from the search index - not a desirable side effect at all. I'd like to structure my content in attributes and still have the whole content of these attributes be lumped into the index for searching, but I couldn't find a way to do this. It seems incredible, I hope I am wrong, but I have searched a lot across this forum

Furthermore my content has accents and I want to allow users to enter the text without accents and the search to find the matches. Without having to add the misspellings to the main description. Normally this is done by adding extra keywords in a separate field that is part of the search, but that is not possible.

I cannot find a way to add a custom attribute to the main keyword search index, so it is used when searching by keyboard. This seems an incredible oversight.

I have seen the workarounds:
- put noscript tags in (pollutes the content and displeases google)
- put the content in the extended information then have a php script chop it up on upload
- use meta tags (products dont have meta tags but i suppose the attribute could be extended to show on products, and then it would be indexed?)(EDIT: i sure cannot see how to do that anywhere either)

the last one might solve my spelling/tags query, but it won't help with structuring data.

so here are my questions:

1. Is there a solution to adding attribute content to the main index that I am not aware of, perhaps using the "upload" functionality? Is there an extension or something in v11 that improves on the situation?

2. The only way I could see to add a searchable attribute is that it appears are a drop down/select/checkbox. This only works for attributes which will have a limited number of clean options. It wouldnt work for an attribute that was, for example "ingredients" or one that would have a lot of values. Is there a way to do a text search in an attribute rather than a select, perhaps via the "upload" functionality, or an extension, or even v11?

2b. Or is there a way to get an attribute that is a value list selector but allows multiple values to be selected per product (not for the search, i know that is possible, but in the product values. All I could find is single select)

3. I started creating some attributes that were of the true/false kind for some flags, but it seems that I cannot use an attribute like this in the search. Is there a workaround beyond redoing them as multiple (2) choice?

4. If I wanted some virtual section pages based on specific values of an attribute, not done dynamically on the server but just created like everything else at upload, without the huge manual hassle of having to clone products and manually maintain a huge list of categories (which becomes horrible when products are discontinued and they are in 24 places), is there a way?

I can certainly extend perl or write php if needed but there is so little documentation as to what options and parameters there are it feels very opaque and risky - and time consuming. I'm beginning to think that Actinic is just not suitable for where I would like the site to be.

[Mike Hughes]

I'm beginning to think that Actinic is just not suitable for where I would like the site to be.

Sounds about right to me. Even if you manage to get your attrubutes organised the way you want them, Actinic in it's present form has no way of presenting products using the same 'ingredient' (for example).

Actinic is very good at creating websites with static pages. A lot has been done to add some interactivity to the websites it creates but it's still largely on a fairly predetermined basis.

If you want a website with the ability for the customer to explore different aspects and interact with it in complex ways that haven't been predetermined then you probably want a dynamic website with all the data held in the background and the customer deciding how they want it presented (by ingredients, brands, tastes, textures, colour, calories, luxuriousness, all vegetarian, etc, etc).

All this intelligent linking, complexity doesn't sound the kind of thing that many ecommerce packages offer. I think it's a very high-end requirement. I suspect you'll have to properly spec exactly the requirements you have and then benchmark the systems you look at.

Best start looking now though. I suspect you'll just find Actinic frustrating coming from the starting position you're at.

Mike

[NickD]

Sounds about right to me. Even if you manage to get your attrubutes organised the way you want them, Actinic in it's present form has no way of presenting products using the same 'ingredient' (for example).

Actinic is very good at creating websites with static pages. A lot has been done to add some interactivity to the websites it creates but it's still largely on a fairly predetermined basis.

Thanks for taking the time to confirm my fears. I was hoping to be able to compromise for a while, as I have a lot to do and a replatforming on top would be painful. I found some of the aspects of static pages refreshing, no hassle with cache or performance issues. And I have plenty of things to focus on commercially that could be done in this if I can just crack a few questions. There was hope.

I would have been perfectly happy with a way to generate a few more sets of static pages, ideally via a local script, and slightly more flexible search index options (allow for adding 1 or 2 attributes to the main keyword index content, so text search includes their content - and allow for true/false attributes to be in the search)

Actually, just the search improvements would be enough... *sigh*

I've already done so much, migrating it to css bit by bit, adding content categories to all these products that are used to place content, I can hope that there is an extension out there...

[NormanRouxel]

Here's a clean way to allow keywords in the product description that won't display. The keywords never appear in the generated HTML and there's no noscript trickery, so there will be no search engine problems. Of course, these keywords are for the Actinic built-in search only. Google, etc will never see them.

In your Product Layouts(s) replace:

	<actinic:variable name="ProductDescription" />

With:

<actinic:block php="true">
	$pdesc = <<< ENDOFCODE
	<actinic:variable name="ProductDescription" />
ENDOFCODE;
	$bits = split('KEYWORDS', $pdesc);
	echo $bits[0];
</actinic:block>

And type your product descriptions like this:

Normal text, etc.
KEYWORDS
Text here will be indexed but won't display.

[NormanRouxel]

Your (4) can be done by creating a section with a single Fragment. Use a custom Fragment Layout "ShowAllWidgets" for that single item that contains (pseudo code):

<actinic:block type="EntireSectionList">
    <actinic:block type="ProductList">
        BlockIf MyVariable == "Widget"
            Product Layout
        /BlockIf
    </actinic:block>
</actinic:block>

[NickD]

Here's a clean way to allow keywords in the product description that won't display. The keywords never appear in the generated HTML and there's no noscript trickery, so there will be no search engine problems. Of course, these keywords are for the Actinic built-in search only. Google, etc will never see them.

Thanks - This is certainly cleaner than the noscript hack as it allows for some structure - within the description instead of a separate attribute but it's already way better

And indeed this is only for the local search - Google seems to have no problem allowing for the usual "typing an accented name without an accent" method, and if I need something for Google it can go in the meta fields for the section

(on v10 so no per product pages yet)

[NickD]

Your (4) can be done by creating a section with a single Fragment. Use a custom Fragment Layout "ShowAllWidgets" for that single item that contains (pseudo code):

<actinic:block type="EntireSectionList">
    <actinic:block type="ProductList">
        BlockIf MyVariable == "Widget"
            Product Layout
        /BlockIf
    </actinic:block>
</actinic:block>

Makes sense! I did something like this to group sections in the menu by category type, will see how it works on products.
It'd be much easier to maintain a dozen Sections with one fragment and one or two variables each than to clone products over and over

[globalee]

keywords in the product description that won't display

Here's a clean way to allow keywords in the product description that won't display. The keywords never appear in the generated HTML and there's no noscript trickery, so there will be no search engine problems. Of course, these keywords are for the Actinic built-in search only. Google, etc will never see them.

In your Product Layouts(s) replace:

	<actinic:variable name="ProductDescription" />

With:

<actinic:block php="true">
	$pdesc = <<< ENDOFCODE
	<actinic:variable name="ProductDescription" />
ENDOFCODE;
	$bits = split('KEYWORDS', $pdesc);
	echo $bits[0];
</actinic:block>

And type your product descriptions like this:

Normal text, etc.
KEYWORDS
Text here will be indexed but won't display.

Is it possible to insert a variable that contains the keywords?? so ican insert a string of keyphrases seperated by keyword1,keyword2

the reason being that I want to use the keyowrds with

false !== stristr(<actinic:variable name="ProductDescription" />, keyword1) OR false !== stristr(<actinic:variable name="ProductDescription" />, keyword2) 

waht im trying to do is include multiple products from a single product per page format in to many sections without the need for having duplicates in each category page, so i was thinking i could include the products by keyword with ths method, or change it so that KEYWORDS data is directly imput in to the

false !== stristr(<actinic:variable name="ProductDescription" />, KEYWORDS) ) 

cheers, lee