eCommerce questions

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Evening all,

I've been reading up on the Concrete5 eCommerce plugin and I have to say it looks fantastic, however, before I part with my hard earned readies I have a quick question for the users!

I know it was designed to break the mold of the standard category, product page, checkout style, but I have customers who will need the category functionality.

By messing around with it I've found the Product Sets (which I imagine I'd use for Categories) but for this to be any use I'd need a way of having an automatically generated nav/product page.

IE, if the customer adds a new category I can't expect him/her to create a page, add the product list block in, then add the url to that to the nav.


Is there a way to replicate that functionality?

 
frz replied on at Permalink Reply
frz
The sets do work well for categories.

I would consider giving them a "category" page type that really just
has the product list block set to pull products from a specific set.
If they want to add a new category, they have to:

1) Add it as a set to at least one product.
2) Copy "category X" to the same holder page.
3) Rename it "category Y"
4) Put it in edit mode and change the product block to look for set Y.

I grant you that's not really mindlessly easy, but that's the price
you pay for the flexibility of not having to deal with just one page
detail template for every product in your store.

best wishes

Franz Maruna
CEO - concrete5.org
http://about.me/frz
bazzlad replied on at Permalink Reply
A reply from the CEO?! Talk about above and beyond!

Thanks Franz, great work you're doing here - I guess that's not too bad, my average clients aren't completely IT illiterate - is there a method to automate these pages in a nav (perhaps by adding them to a sub category and creating a nav that only displays that sub category? [Just guessing here]).

Just so I know for future reference, is anything like that planned for the future? (If not I may have a pop at coding something myself.)

I'll give it a whirl, liking the style of everything I've seen.

:D
frz replied on at Permalink Reply
frz
Thanks.

Generally I'd say no. Our sense is the categories of a good store
don't change from day to day.

I can always see a beefier version of ecommerce being developed really
for the stores for > 1,000 products.
We've also thought a lot about integration with Magento, but I just
don't see good business reasoning to that play.


best wishes

Franz Maruna
CEO - concrete5.org
http://about.me/frz