Hi everyone

 

I have a requirement from a client. Basically he has over 1000 products, he wants to list them all on the site, like a catalogue, but has no need for e-commerce facilities, no products will be able to be ordered online.

 

I'm trying to think of the best way to do this rather than populating each page myself, can i do it via php and a database, i'll need to pull Name, image, descripition and product code from the database and populate it as html within a php page, is this do-able and how much work is involved.

 

Hope somone can help me on this

 

Many Thanks

 

Marco

yes, this is possible - it is basically just a customised CMS, in that the display format of the data mimics a store. You could use Wordpress, Textpattern, or similar and customise the template for this to work.

Hi Marco,

 

I had a similar issue last year when working on a site for an Italian estate agent. He had 500+ houses on his books and wanted a site to display all of them. I used a MySQL database and PHP to enable the site to display the houses subject to the criteria which the customer selected. I provided him with maintenance pages to enable him to maintain the database to add, update or delete properties and took advantage of the unique identifier for each house (eg 1234) which I used to identify associated pictures of that house (eg 1234s1, 1234s2, 1234s3, etc.) which were stored in a folder also called by the unique identifier. See www.itcasa.eu. Unfortunately, you can't view the PHP code in the source.

 

Hope this helps a little

 

KR

 

RobV

There's two ways that spring to my mind...

 

1. Use a shopping cart system

- This will give you all the functionality you need, categories, products, search

- Just strip out the add2cart buttons and the cart/checkout links from the templates

- Import the items via CSV into the database using the carts importer (all good carts have import facilities)

 

2. Use a CMS

- A good CMS will make it easy to set up your categories, products and search

- Importing product data will probably mean you have to write a small script to populate your database