Catalogs , Categories & CMS

[hasalem]

Hi all,
I'm not sure if I'm missing something in Konakart or not. But I need to perform the following
1- To define invisible category  to hold  some products, so this category is not shown in the tree. should I use custom fields, or there is another way for that
2- to define catalogs, i.e. Winter catalog, summer...etc. where each catalog has its categories.
3- how to use open cms or any other CMS to maintain the products data. also other data like categories, manufacturer. I mean using a CMS and its workflow to publish my data.

Best Regards
Hatem Salem

[ryan]

1- To define invisible category  to hold  some products, so this category is not shown in the tree. should I use custom fields, or there is another way for that
2 - to define catalogs, i.e. Winter catalog, summer...etc. where each catalog has its categories.

Your catalogs and invisible products can be just top level categories . At the JSP level you can decide what to show and not to show.

3- how to use open cms or any other CMS to maintain the products data. also other data like categories, manufacturer. I mean using a CMS and its workflow to publish my data.

To achieve that at the moment you would need to store the data in a format where you can easily maintain it in CMS land. Once you decide to publish it, you could call our API using the SOAP interface to actually update our DB and make the data live.

[hasalem]

Your catalogs and invisible products can be just top level categories . At the JSP level you can decide what to show and not to show.

I think this way is not practical, normally in business, the Content editors are preparing the data. Let's say we are showing the winter products. and normally the content editors are preparing the spring products and the sale of winter products. then in a certain day, the CEs "content editors" needs to show the spring catalog and hide the winter catalog.

But your suggested way means that I need to change the invisible property of all products of a certain season" consider that we may have up to 8 seasons "Winter-Winter Sale-Spring-Spring sale...etc"

Also I need to move or make the curreng shown products to be invisible or to move them to the root. consider we have thousands or even hundreds of products.

Also I'm not sure if the searching will search in  invisible products also. If it does, it will be a big problem

Any other ideas will be highly appreciated.
I think introducing catalog concept to konakart will expand the business line of konakart. with considering all side effects like searching...etc.


Best regards.
Hatem Salem.

[ryan]

I never mentioned setting invisible products.

What I said is that your catalogs can be under different top level categories. You can easily decide based on some business logic which top level categories to display and also based on this decision you can filter all product searches by this top level category making sure that searchInSubCats is set to true.