Posted by jbeech on July 10, 2012 at 12:08am
I have a site with a mobile capable theme loaded at www.promodeler.com. The purpose of the site isn't to act as a shopping cart, but to act as a catalog for the products.
However, I am having trouble figuring out how to get the products showing by category. I do not want to use Commerce since the products are sold by brick-and-mortar stores, e.g. this site is a reference of what ProModeler offers. Can I do this without Commerce? Simply put, the products need to be sorted.
Comments
Great question. I would
Great question. I would tackle it by creating content types and using the views module to sort.
Taxonomy
Are you familiar with the power in taxonomy? You create a taxonomy for your catalog terms then use that with views.
Joe Moraca
WebDevGeeks.com
You could use commerce, but
You could use commerce, but not activate the payment modules. The Commerce Kickstart and reverse engineer it for an example, since I think it sets up products and categories for you.
The only difference is that you would need to create products, and product displays, but I believe the Kickstart has the views already created for categorizing your content with taxonomy.
Don't be fooled by the "Commerce" name. It can be easily used for anything that is a product that needs to be displayed and then sorted.
Otherwise, like Joe said, add some taxonomy terms to a product content type, and then build a view to display them.
Thank you for wrapping that
Thank you for wrapping that up very nicely.
Here's an update . . . still no banana!
Here's an update . . . we're tantalizingly close but still, no banana.
For the vocabulary Product Categories, a field was added called Information (for body text, e.g. where we describe the category in some detail - a landing page for the category). In the tab Manage Display we set this to Visible.
The Information field shows up, and text can be entered but unfortunately, when we try to view this, it doesn't show up. This has us buffaloed.
Meanwhile, trying to resolve this issue we added another module called Taxonomy Display but it didn't seem to help (and no, we haven't removed it yet).
ESC
Equipment
Heli Acc.
Batteries
Tools
. . . selecting ESC takes us to http://www.promodeler.com/taxonomy/term/18 where the first listing, ESC, is the name of the term (and presumably the landing page). However, the text we put in for the landing page doesn't appear (except when we select edit and then its there). Anyway, below ESC are the various products for the ESC category but in the meantime, we cannot figure out why the long description for this term (ESC) doesn't appear.
How do we get this landing page to work?
John Beech - GM (and janitor)
http://www.genesishobby.com
407-302-3361
You're going to have to get
You're going to have to get into Views to display your categories now.
Have you added products to the store? This is how commerce works:
Think of the Products as your warehouse. Think of your Product Displays as your catalog.
You should add your taxonomy field to your products, not your displays. Add a node reference to your product displays that link your display to your products. This lets you use another node as data in a separate node. This way you can manage your products with the commerce module.
Now create views to display your items and sort them based on whatever criteria you want.
Incidentally, you could install the commerce quickstart, and then change your theme afterwards. Themes are pretty much independent of your content.
My suggestion as well would be to get a local site set up that you can play and experiment with. Check out the Quickstart project. You can have a fully working drupal development environment running locally that you can work on and test.
Not using the Commerce Kickstart, you are creating a good bit more work for yourself, but the plus is that you will learn commerce in the process.
I still think showing products and managing them with commerce is a great way to start. You've set yourself up for the case that if you ever do decide to sell these products, you are well along.
You could do this more simply without commerce just by creating a content type, say "Products" and then adding a taxonomy field for categories. You'll still need to use views to create your "catalog" page, but you can use an exposed filter to allow users to select the categories they want.
I would stop using the Taxonomy Display. It is overcomplicating what you are trying to do.
All you need is the commerce module, views, and the rest is core drupal.
Your body text is already handled through the commerce module.
Your product display will have three fields:
I just peeked at your site,
I just peeked at your site, you might want to install Mollom or some other spam protection. It looks like you have some adds from the Russian pharmacy there!
Mollom
Thanks for pointing us to Mollom. We never saw the pharmacy adverts, how were you able to?
Anyway, we just installed Mollom but never saw any indication it had found something, much less removed it.
Is our site clean now?
Many thanks!
John Beech - GM (and janitor)
http://www.genesishobby.com
407-302-3361
I don't remember where they
I don't remember where they were, but if you check through your comments and content there are a few in there.
Check out the documentation for Mollom, there are instructions in there for configuring it. It won't remove ones that are already there, it will just prevent new spam from coming in.
there should be a manage
there should be a manage display tab on the edit taxonomy page - url something like:
admin/structure/taxonomy/esc/display
be sure the description field (which I assume you filled in) is set to visible not hidden
Joe Moraca
WebDevGeeks.com