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Using Price Tapestry for broadband / mobile comparison

Submitted by ms348 on Thu, 2015-08-06 20:12 in

Hi,

I've just bought Price Tapestry and want to convert an existing comparison website that compares broadband and mobile offers to use it. I've only just started to look into PT but my guess is that it is entirely possible to use PT to hold the data? The only reason I ask is because PT seems very PRODUCT centric rather than services centric.

Thanks,

M

Submitted by support on Fri, 2015-08-07 05:16

Hi and welcome to the forum!

"out of the box", yes Price Tapestry is product centric but lots of users have created mobile and other service comparison and there are number of features to help you do this.

First of all, it's very easy to add custom fields so this would most likely be your starting point, to include fields for the kind of data you wish to include in your price comparison tables, e.g. for mobile comparison you might have fields for inclusive minutes, inclusive texts, data etc. However, where appropriate I would suggest using a numeric type for the custom fields on the pt_products table as this will enable you to sort by those fields should you wish to. Instead of the dbmod.php script shown on the custom fields page for adding text based fields, to add a new field "minutes" using a numeric type e.g. INT(11), you could use the following:

dbmod.php

<?php
  
require("includes/common.php");
  
$sql "ALTER TABLE `".$config_databaseTablePrefix."feeds`
            ADD `field_minutes` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL"
;
  
database_queryModify($sql,$result);
  
$sql "ALTER TABLE `".$config_databaseTablePrefix."products`
            ADD `minutes` INT(11) NOT NULL"
;
  
database_queryModify($sql,$result);
  print 
"Done.";
?>

(note that the field_minutes column added to the feeds table is still a text field as this holds the field name from your feeds that contain the minutes value rather than the value itself - also don't forget to add the custom field to your $config_fieldSet array as described on the custom fields page)

Secondly, you can remove the duplicate prevention mechanism within Price Tapestry so that the product page for a particular handset will compare all offers from all merchants for that handset. This is easily done by dropping the dupe_filter index and dbmod scripts for both this, and restoring the index should you need to are in this comment.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
David.
--
PriceTapestry.com

Submitted by ms348 on Thu, 2015-08-13 09:58

Many thanks for the information David :)

Regards,

Manoj