Discussions

Displaying products

Hello, I am an advanced PHP/Web developer but am only just creating my first Drupal site. I feel like I've gotten a good start on using Drupal.. created my own basic theme etc.

Now for the e-commerce side of my the site I am currently developing. I get how to create products and product displays. I'm confused with how I would display the products though. Would I create .tpl.php files? For example, I want visitors to my site to click the shop now link and be taken to a page that shows my 3 products, a jar, a 4-pack of jars, and a gallon. What is the best (or some of the best) ways to create and stylize a page which will display these 3 products?

I personally like getting my hands dirty with HTML and CSS. I'm not all that comfortable with panels because I do not like the html it generates, but any suggestions with any module are welcome.

mikeken763
Posted: Aug 18, 2011

Comments

tahiticlic on August 18, 2011

I've tried the kickstart in order to get the proper catalog view, but there's no such view included.

Ryan, can you provide informations on how to construct such a view? I mean a view showing children categories and children products for a given category, as eCommerce solution often (if not always) provide.

Thanks!

tahiticlic on August 22, 2011

Well, this is good for a very very simple catalog. But let's say you have a real catalog to display, that will can be something like 1000 entries in a vocabulary, with a hierarchical structure : how can you create a catalog structure to display your categories and products?
I mean something like Ubercart provides natively for instance (or Magento, or Prestashop...).

I think this is something that an eCommmerce solution MUST provide. I've worked on a solution in D6 and shall port it, but maybe there's a better solution using Views for instance (the problem is nested categories for which the view should display children categories and products).

Moreover, the video shows a method that is too complex for users of Commerce, who are NOT geeks. Developers are not the final users in most cases, and telling them that for each new category created they have to create the menu link using path, etc etc, is far from their competences.

For this particular point of catalog menu, maybe a view with the correct template is a better approach since it avoids to deal with links.

tahiticlic on August 22, 2011

Catalog main content display :
Maybe with 2 views that can be easily achieved, even with a lot of catalog categories entries.
When you are on a category, the first view could show products in this category and the second one could show direct children (for deeper children shown as links, I don't see how to do it easily with views).

Catalog menu block :
This is more complex.
Since a thousand entries menu will lead to memory explosion, the solution of using Taxonomy Menu is not possible.
Using Views to create the menu will face the problem of hierarchical structure, and without a lot of logic in the template (which should be in a custom module) this won't be possible to render. Moreover, to activate links won't be as easy as it is with menu.
I guess for this menu, a dedicated module would be the better solution.

Any ideas or ways to explore?