Giving each product its own page (and more)

[RobSollars]

We're currently thinking of doing something of a serious restructuring of our database, but would like to know if what we have in mind is achievable before we go ahead with it. I'm afraid that this post is a little long, so it might be advisable to get a cup of tea before embarking on the task of reading it.

At the moment, we have a pretty standard Actinic product template. We have three levels of sections: manufacturer at the top, then printer type, then the actual product. The products themselves are laid out in rows with several products per page. You can see an example of this at http://mega-office.co.uk/acatalog/Ep...o_Printer.html. From the breadcrumbs at the top, you can see the current structure of our database, with Epson as the parent section, Epson Printer Ink Cartridges as the subsection and then all the products nested within that section.

What we'd like to do is add another level to this structure. In this utopian vision of our database, every product would have its own subsection. Thus, for the above example, the structure would become: Epson > Epson Printer Ink Cartridge > Epson Compatible Picturemate Cartridge and Paper > Actual product component.

That part is obviously quite possible. However, it's not a good idea in terms of usability, since the customer is required to click through to one section more than necessary to be able to buy their product.

Instead, we'd like to have it so that the customer can order from both the product page and the section above. Thus, in the above example, the pages Epson Printer Ink Cartridge and Epson Compatible Picturemate Cartridge and Paper would be pages from which you can add items to your shopping cart.

Having spent hours slaving over a hot stylesheet, I've come up with what I think is quite a nice looking layout for the product rows, which should be viewable at http://printinginks.net/acatalog/Eps...o_Printer.html. The idea is that the product titles would be a link that takes you through to the product page, where further information on the individual product resides.

Phew. So the actual question is: is this at all possible? Can we have cart functions enabled at two different levels like this? And if not, is there a way around it?

Thanks for reading this far. I appreciate any and all input on the matter.

[jont]

It wil work fine - keep the master product with all the details in the main section you need and then place the duplicates into the new layout you created above - users can then buy at the duplicate slim-down version or link through to the main product for further details.

All you are doing is using duplicates but with a link back to the master. I have done this several times but use it more for a "new arrivals" type section

[RobSollars]

Thanks, jont, you have made my day!

[jont]

Probably just a work-in-progress at the moment but the CSS layout is rendering wrongly (as usual) in IE ... looks like the borders / margins causing conflict in IE

[jont]

A sneaky way to link back to the master from the duplicate is

<a href="http://www.site.com/cgi-bin/ss00000x.pl?PRODREF=NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTREFERENCE&ACTINIC_REFERRER=http://www.site.com/acatalog/&NOLOGIN=1">Click here</a>

[RobSollars]

jont, that is brilliant, thanks ever so much. We just had a long discussion about how we'd work it, but stumbled when we figured we couldn't easily link to the duplicate, but you even provided the solution to that! Thanks for your contribution.

As for IE, I've tested it in that dreaded browser and can't see anything obviously wrong with it. I purposely disabled the dotted borders because IE seems to think that 'dotted' and 'dashed' are synonyms. The test server is a little slow, and seems to randomly decide to withhold external files based on the phases of the moon or some other arcane method, so maybe that's it. What issue were you having with it?

Thanks again.

[jont]

Hi Rob - I am seeing the horizontal borders in FF but not in IE.

Dont have the time to dig deep into this but if you are setting the height of the box don't forget IE takes its measurements different than the W3C guidelines for borders and margins ... often zeroing padding or wrapping into a zeroed wrap <div> can resolve such issues

[RobSollars]

Ah, thanks again jont. I hacked those borders out of IE, since if it can't be bothered to do dotted borders then it doesn't deserve any borders at all. I'll add them back in later.

[RobSollars]

I had a go at implementing this this morning and, predictably, ran into a couple of problems.

Creating a subsection for each product and then having duplicates in both the parent section and its own unqiue subsection works fine. However, what this does to the template is create a list of subsections above the new template.

Am I missing something obvious somewhere? Is there some netquotevar that I can get rid of to stop the unwanted list appearing? I should imagine it's caused by Act_ProductBody, so it's out of my hands, since we still want that behaviour to appear on any first or second level parent sections.

Or is there some way to exclude products from appearing in navigation? Hiding products from the website stops them from appearing at all, so that doesn't really work.

[jont]

Do a forum search on preventing sections from appearing as this has been discussed before - the usual/easiest solution is often to resort to hard-coded navigation so you are not then restricted by the auto-generated code by Actinic and you can then lay the navigation out exactly how you want it

[RobSollars]

Further complications

Sorry to summon this thread from the depths of obscurity, but it seems that in the process of digging up the delicious truffle of a solution, I also unearth several violent problem moles who mercilessly hound me with their sharp teeth and luxurious fur.

Frankly bizarre imagery aside, I've finally got round to giving this a go. Everything was going fine until I tried out the method for linking to the expanded info and ran afoul of our cruel database structure.

Because we have master products that are duplicated into a number of sections, using a product's reference to link to the extended info is quite impossible, since the product reference refers specifically to the master product, which is unfortunately hidden on the site.

We could resolve all this by moving the master products into the relevant sections and unhiding them, but this is obviously a big task that is likely to unearth entire problem mole communities, bent on the destruction of their aboveground oppressors.

So I thought I'd throw it open to the Actinic community before proceeding to see if anyone had any ideas on how to accomplish this feat. What would be ideal would be some sort of NETQUOTEVAR that provides a static link to the page containing expanded info. I know you can do this with the 'Links' section of a product, but finding every relevant section in the provided dropdown list (which is not only far too small, but also not alphabetically sorted, making finding anything a nightmare), would take far too much work to be feasible.

An even better solution would be if a product's expanded information properties weren't forced into a javascripted pop-up window. If these pages were actually catalog[ue] pages that had static links that didn't pass through the CGI bin, this would be fantastic.

Thanks.

[Seethapathy]

An even better solution would be if a product's expanded information properties weren't forced into a javascripted pop-up window. If these pages were actually catalog[ue] pages that had static links that didn't pass through the CGI bin, this would be fantastic.

Hi Rob

Not sure if this helps, but we can get the Extended info to appear on the same page instead of the Java pop-ups. There is a knowlede base article here

[Jan]

You are so lucky to have so many moles (I collect them you know), however, does having your products not marked as hidden on the site make any difference, ie: put them into a hidden section instead - probably won't but you never know.

If not I might be able to write you a little program to swap the first visible duplicate with the first hidden one - from what you have said, that might sort it out for you.

Regards,

[RobSollars]

Hi Rob

Not sure if this helps, but we can get the Extended info to appear on the same page instead of the Java pop-ups. There is a knowlede base article here

Hi Seeths,

Thanks very much for the link. I did not know that this was possible, but having thought about it, I'm not sure if having a page of extended information is going to allow us the functionality that we need.

You are so lucky to have so many moles (I collect them you know), however, does having your products not marked as hidden on the site make any difference, ie: put them into a hidden section instead - probably won't but you never know.

If not I might be able to write you a little program to swap the first visible duplicate with the first hidden one - from what you have said, that might sort it out for you.

Regards,

Hi Jan,

The current solution that we have come up with is to take all the hidden master products, put them in their relevant sections and unhide them. However, if I understand what you're suggesting, it sounds like it will provide an ideal solution to the problem that we are having and probably save us a lot of time and headaches.

We'll hopefully have something uploaded for testing by the end of today, so we'll see how that goes.

Thanks for everyone's replies.