Sort orders

[Mr Questions!]

Is it possible to give our customers the choice to sort products in order - price, popularity etc. in order to make their buying a little more refined? At the moment we have a some pages with up to 25 products on and I am sure people give up before getting to the bottom.

[Jan]

The only way to do this is to add extra sections with duplicate products to your catalog listing the orders in the different sort orders, then link to them. If you do this, you can sort your orders in Actinic using drag and drop or we have a little tool to help with this, you can find more details of our product and a free trial at this address :

http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/Cat...ting_Tool.html

Regards,

[NormanRouxel]

This can be done but requires a lot of template tinkering and a PHP enabled server. See http://www.drillpine.biz/v7php-test/...c_Products.php for a proof of concept test of such a system.

[Jan]

Very nice Norman - it isn't taking component pricing in to account at the moment when you order by price.

Regards,

[NormanRouxel]

That's right. It doesn't use anything other than the main product price (which can be zero for certain products). I just did it to see if it could be done.

There's no database involved. Just very weird product template that displays nothing but instead puts each product's data into a PHP array structure. Then once all products have been loaded the PHP displays the products, sorted and filtered.

[Jan]

I wonder if you could do it more easily V8 - given that you can code your layouts in PHP.

I generally only use product price with my tools as well - but what you can do if you want to use components is add a price for the product but change the templates to not use it and use the sum of components as the price.

I like the fact that you can select the layout as well as the price sorting - gives people exactly what you want. It would make a very popular plugin if you were to formalise it - I'd buy a V8 one :-).

Regards,

[Mr Questions!]

Cheers for the help guys - this one will have to go on the backburner for a while methinks.

Joe

[PaulGrimshaw]

Hi Norman,

How is this coming on? Its something I would be interested in. Would it work as a "Find a Prezzie" type thing where I could use it instead of a search page, leaving the normal static pages as they are?

Thanks,
Paul.

[NormanRouxel]

Paul,

This doesn't work catalog wide. It only sorts each page in various ways.

[PaulGrimshaw]

Could it be used if we had a section which was basically duplicates? i.e. every item we had in other sections was duplicated in a 'search' page, or does that become to big?

I wish actinic had a database/static combo

Thanks,
Paul.

[NormanRouxel]

This might work but it might run out of resources on the server.

This patch subverts the normal HTML generation of a page to instead put all the products into PHP data structures. You can then use the server to spew out the products in whatever order or filtering you like. If you had 1000 products that would be a LOT of PHP data.

Please note that this was done as an exercise (you don't know if some things are possible until you do them). It would take many days of work (at many days cost) to implement on a live site.