Hi
We run a digital distribution company & sell both individual products and album (music, images, teaching, etc) products.
We are looking for a performant way to add the album layer into the Product Listing & Details pages. Ideally, we would like the hierarchy to look something like Main Category (eg music, images, teaching, ebook), Category (genres of music, etc), Manufacturer (Artist/Author/Teacher), Bundle (Album, Series), Individual products.
I have looked at using the custom fields however I am concerned this will have a performance impact as I may need to iterate over all Categories/Manufacturers/Products to display all the relationships.
Regards,
Innes
Could you explain what you mean by :
Quoteto add the album layer into the Product Listing & Details pages
Hi
I am thinking of an album as a product that would be shown separately from the singles. Therefore, if you select the manufacturer then the listing would show albums at the top then singles beneath.
Selecting detail on the album would display links to the individual singles & selecting detail on the single would display a link back to the album. We could do this via the description and/or custom fields but it would include a lot of manual html and maintenance and we want to make this a simple for the manufacturers/our admins as possible.
Hope this makes more sense,
Innes
In order to associate the album with its singles and the singles with their album, you could use the dependent products merchandising link. These links are easy to set up using the admin app.
Thanks Trevor.
I had looked at the merchandising types but I was wanting to keep them for their original purpose. Do you know if you can add more types?
I am thinking that I would like Parent/Child (eg track to & from album), siblings (others tracks on same album), alternative formats (eg pdf, epub, kindle).
cheers,
Innes
Can't you just put the album identifier into a custom field for all of the children and vice versa? Once someone has clicked on the album, it's a single search query to find all of the children.
Hi Trevor
Apologies for the delay in getting back to to you. I have thought about this a bit more and was wondering if I could add additional relation_types to products_to_products?
At the moment I can see a value of '5' in the demo sql, are there defined values for the various merchandising relationships? Do you know the impact on the admin app & kk API if I added (for example) 10 for parent/child, 20 for sibling, 30 for alternative formats?
Do you know where the relation_type values are defined? Are they configurable?
Thanks,
Innes
I "think" that using the APIs you should be able to use whatever relation types you want, although I'd keep high (100+) so as to avoid any future upgrade problems.