Discussions

Product Catalog Discussion

We had a brief discussion this afternoon on IRC. The log is uploaded as an attachment. The gist of it was to toss around ideas for default catalog implementations that wouldn't be a part of core but would be available as starting points for shops as part of a DC distribution.

The absolute minimum could simple be a listing of product nodes in a View at /catalog, while the next step up would make assumptions about the categorization of products to present a taxonomy based catalog at /catalog. Targeting larger sites, the basic idea is to pursue some sort of generic faceting system.

One thing this discussion really highlighted was the problem we'll have of sorting display nodes based on data contained on referenced products. This issue isn't going to go away and will need a satisfactory set of basic guidelines / best practices. I lean toward putting as much as possible on the product itself (i.e. any fields you might want to facet on) and have some sort of reverse reference so the display node can be found from the product itself. But I really don't know how that could happen. ; )

Ryan Szrama
Posted: May 13, 2010

Comments

Anonymous (not verified) on November 8, 2010

Take a look at this post by Rand Fishkin.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/17-new-rules-for-successful-ecommerce-websites

Basically, current UC catalog is probably the worst I've seen so far. End users are forced to just one view, with no options to change that. Most of functionality that Rand is talking about can be done with views 3, so probably DC catalog should be just a view.

Ryan Ryan Szrama on November 15, 2010

That's actually just the normal taxonomy display. : )

The only work I did was to add a menu and enable the block linking to the taxonomy pages, but core did the rest (including custom URLs for the taxonomy pages).