Limited Number of Products per page

[outboxin]

Am I correct in that I cannot limit the number of products that I would like to display per page and then put page numbers to navigate throughout the section? The way I'm understanding this, the only way to simulate this is to make a subsection for every product??

It seems like bad usability to have a scroll of 100 products and a lot of work to create a section for each product. As far as I can tell, the first post about this was years ago .... is it really not included yet?

[leehack]

You are correct. Although, if you have a section of 100 products, there is nothing to stop you creating 10 sections of 10 products each, it is all manual though.

'previous' and 'next' links is what you are after and it is detailed in the AUG.

[outboxin]

Thanks for your reply. Here are the parts I'm not clear on:
1. If I created multiple sibling sections, how do I get only the first one to appear in a subsection list?
2. Is there a way to convert the next and previous links into page links .... so that you can tell how many pages of products there are?

Thanks again.
Lauren

[outboxin]

Maybe this is a better question:
Where in Actinic is it specifying to loop through all of the products in a section when displaying a product list? Is there a way to change this coding to have it stop after a certain number?

[pinbrook]

Maybe this is a better question:
Where in Actinic is it specifying to loop through all of the products in a section when displaying a product list? Is there a way to change this coding to have it stop after a certain number?

actinic does not do this. The best you can do is Lee's suggestion

[outboxin]

Any help on these itesm then?

:
1. If I created multiple sibling sections, how do I get only the first one to appear in a subsection list?
2. Is there a way to convert the next and previous links into page links .... so that you can tell how many pages of products there are?

[fergusw]

There is possibly a way to get an approximation of what you require using CSS and some javascript.
e.g.
Premise:
You have 100 products in a section.You only want 10 products to show at any one time with the option of being able to navigate through each group of 10.

Possible solution (not yet tested):
Using V8's product list layout you could encapsulate every 10 products in a DIV with style="display:none" attribute, effectively hiding it on the page.
You would then create a navigation e.g. <ul><li> style which calls a javascript function which would toggle the display style attribute to none or show accordingly.

Another way would be using the same encapsulation with Div tags, however having a "display" div correctly positioned on the page and using javascript to copy the innerHTML property of the selected "hidden" DIV and replacing the innerHTML property of the "display" div, thereby rendering the content as required.

This would basically mean you could have a CSS based TAB navigation through a single section. With the V8 product list layout you could easily make the number of products per tab to be a user defined variable allowing control over the number of products appearing in the tabs.

It's late, and I'm thinking on the hoof. We'll maybe put a test together to see tomorrow.
It wont directly give you "pages" to move between, but it might offer a useable alternative?

[jont]

how do I get only the first one to appear in a subsection list?

You can use a block if with a condition ListIndex == 1 wrapping the layout list which generates the subsections

[jont]

Tencapsulate every 10 products in a DIV with style="display:none" attribute, effectively hiding it on the page.

Fergus - how would the search engines treat this? Is there a potential for it being classed as spamming by hiding 90% of the page from them?

[jont]

"Tencapsulate " .. don't know how I manged to quote that but it works nicely for 10 products.. I'm off to the Trademark Office right now

[fergusw]

Fergus - how would the search engines treat this? Is there a potential for it being classed as spamming by hiding 90% of the page from them?

There is always the potential when search engines are involved

Interesting point. If you had 90 out of 100 products hidden then quite possibly, however one would hope that 100 products on a page would have some variation in content i.e. avoiding falling into black hat hidden seo text stuffing traps, but that is no guarantee.

There are Actinic sites out there where there are product description content wrapped in DIVs and hidden in a similar manner. I think Norman has done some donationware TAB layout for products. If it is one product per page with 3 tabs 66% of content on page would be hidden...... ?

Tencapsulate

- quite inspired Jont

[NormanRouxel]

My Tabber add-on lays out the tabs sequentially down the page using standard HTML. Each tab heading goes into a UL and the tabs follow within named DIV's.

It's only after page load is complete that some JavaScript kicks in and rearranges them so that only the first one is visible.

I'd expect search engines to be happy with this. It would be easy to test. If there's a Tabber user out there who wants to try googling for some of their own tabbed text please have a go using first and later tab content.

[fergusw]

It's only after page load is complete that some JavaScript kicks in and rearranges them so that only the first one is visible.

I'd expect search engines to be happy with this.

This technique would definately be an improvement

[TraceyHand]

hmmm..what am I checking for? LOL

It does index the "hidden" tabs, if that's what you mean?
I just searched for a phrase (albeit specifically...ie in quotes) that only appears on a second tab and it was found on Google.

Is that what you mean? (it's early, I'm not entirely awake yet )

[fergusw]

Lauren,
We have put together a little example of something that might be along the lines of what you were asking - here
Please note the SE concerns of this solution however!