Custom search on section headings

[martinkay]

Hi all

I'm doing some work on an enormous gift store which has for the most part its Actinic tree structure broken down by manufacturer name, but we also need to be able to take a view across the sections by a few popular angles (for example) by suitable age range, or celebration type (e.g. anniversary, birthday etc.).

Rather than label every single product, a huge job, would it work to add a new Text or List of Choices variable at the section level to describe the content of that section, with a view to then creating a handful of custom buttons that go direct to a set of search results displaying all the section headings matching whatever button was pressed? E.g. a children's gifts button which displays section headings from all manufacturers with sections labelled "children". Or is there a better way of doing it?

Cheers
Martin

[I-CC]

Think you are talking about categorizing the products (but not to be confused with the inbuilt Category option available in actinic).

I would say, create a variable called 'Categorized', applied at Section Level but also available via Use Parent for the actual Products within. Maybe assign it as list based and create a list of the potential categories and enabled for search use.

Then, assign sections or down to products with the appropriate category and then setup the search function with showing it on the search page and you can then expand on it from there.

Other ways of doing it also - but a lot more indepth.

[martinkay]

Well we have got the section category in there, also available at product level with "use parent", and activated for search, and it all works, except, that it delivers all the products in the search result, and there are too many of them. The idea was for the search result just to deliver a list of section headings to the searcher, that contain products with the specified category. Not sure how to tell Actinic not to list all the products in the search results, just their parent sections.

[leehack]

If you have SPP setup, whether the link is to section or product, it makes little difference surely? Search results return products, that's what it's there for. If you want it to return sections, why not create your own section menu with the products already in there and bypass the search results completely? If this is of some use to the site and its users, create a menu and have the options on hand, having to go off to another page to do this seems to be lacking usability somewhat.

[martinkay]

So you are suggesting, create additional sections called baby or birthday, and fill them with duplicate product links from the manufacturer section originals? I think the store owner may have already considered this but there are so many sections in the main menu already he didn't want to just make it longer.

[leehack]

Your problem with returning a section in a product search is that the section could contain any sort of products in theory. With SPP you don't get that and each product search result effectively links back to it's own page.

I'm not too sure of your situation, I just don't like the principle of hiding something in the search, if indeed that will be helpful to a user. If it takes a day to create some new methods of shopping that improve your site, what's the hardship is my stance. It can depend on the number of products for sure, however if that becomes an issue why not focus on certain parts which is what you seem to be intimating.

Lots of sites nowadays offer by colour, by size, by price, by brand etc. These can take some time to setup in actinic using duplicates, however there are some much quicker ways around to do that nowadays. You can also do custom menus yourself that only show sections with certain settings in their variables, all depends on the amount of products and what is required.

[martinkay]

custom menus yourself that only show sections with certain settings in their variables

I think this is going to be the answer, can you give me a pointer as to how to create these?

[leehack]

You can run a Block on entiresectionlist and use a blockif to limit it to the sections where you have something specifically set in the variable. Some people report slowness when using entiresectionlist, so the larger the site the more this appears to happen, i've not had it myself.

To give any useful advice, i'd really need a rough idea on the number of products and also the additional menu choices to be offered.

[martinkay]

About 6000 products, with about 50 top level sections, many of which, for the larger manufacturers, can have a further 20 or more subsections, others have between 5 and 10 subsections and a few go straight to product level. Probably looking at about getting half a dozen different "themed" slices through the data of the types mentioned. The full ACD file for the site is 230MB. Does that help give a flavour of size?

I can see there are some deleted sections in the tree that have taken the approach of creating a "theme" section filling with duplicates so that's obviously been tried before.

[martinkay]

I have found a site that seems to do something like we are looking for, at play.com. Halfway down on the right is a big ad for a campaign for "chart music, videos, etc. from £3.99". "Chart" being their equivalent way of slicing through the products. This leads to a page of section headings, with three products shown from each section, that are "Chart". There are others on the site such as "Girls" that deliver similar pages of 3-product sections. Can't immediately envisage how to replicate that in Actinic though.