Hi ,
I know that categories is a problem for some and it is becoming one for me too. Now, what I've been thinking is, because my site will be selling two distinctly separate types of product (for example, sports and computers (not what it will be selling, but just to show what I mean) , the merchants that I select will be just for one type or the other, there will would be no similar products between them. Which get's me onto my question, if we can't do categories due to the way that feeds can be different and all that, can we group merchants?
For example:
page one will show merchants 1, 2, 5 & 8
page two will show merchants 3, 4, 6 & 7
This to me would solve my category problem and I also don't really want to go down the route of having multiple installations due to the size of the feeds, maintenance, etc
Is it possible to do this at all? I assume it would just be an IF statement of some kind if this can be done through Price Tapestry.
Cheers
Ben
Hi David ,
I'd looked at that previously, but because all the feeds contain many different items it makes it difficult to split down like that and I do want to keep the categories that the feeds use.
One thing that I have thought of doing doing a find & replace on my feeds to replace with something like Category name, but would this show when registering? And would I then be able to filter buy that?
With my grouping the merchants idea, what I was thinking was like an SQL statement. Maybe create another table that holds all merchants names which I would update if I add a new one, and use this table to pull in some merchants for one page and others for another, all while keeping the categories so that I can split the items down further.
Thanks
Ben
Hi Ben,
Could you perhaps give a couple of examplified URLs of how you would like to differentiate the pages so that the script can determine which merchant set to use?
Thanks,
David.
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PriceTapestry.com
Okay, say I sell computer stuff and clothing. I have a page called computing and a page called clothing.
www.something.co.uk/computing.php
www.something.co.uk/clothing.php
I'd have merchants like PC World, Comet, Maplins, etc for computing
For clothing I'd have merchants like Next, Republic, River Island, etc.
I want to keep the categories that are already there so I don't want to mess with the ones that are in the feeds. So what I was thinking to do if possible is when loading up computing.php only load info from certain merchants, and the same with clothing.php.
Everything on the page look wise and coding wise would be basically the same. I assume that I'd need to link to separate common file that links to a different database.php file? Something like that. Then if I add a new merchant I just update one of the files to add the new merchant name to it and then that merchant will also show on the relevant page.
It would just make things so much easier to manage for me for many reasons if this can be done.
Thanks for the clarification.
I'm really sorry and I thought for a while over this but with the merchant filter having to be applied in so many different queries (and there being several different pages for each site) I can't think of an easy way in which it would be practical.
I may still not have quite understood - I'm thinking at the moment that starting at, e.g. computing.php and clothing.php you effectively want a full Price Tapestry installation (merchant, category and brand indexes and search) but limited to a list of merchants for that category, please correct if i'm wrong of course...
Cheers,
David.
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PriceTapestry.com
Hi Ben,
Not sure if this is quite what you're wanting but were you aware that on Feed Registration Step 2 you can specify a single category name for the feed instead of selecting a field name to register?
Cheers,
David.
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PriceTapestry.com