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Product setup Strategy - Not for the faint of heart

Submitted by m on Sat, 04/26/2008 - 09:03
m
Posts: 4
 Joined: 04/26/2008

Greetings everyone. I am looking for some creative thinking when it comes to setting up products for a project I hope to do. The client is an old employer, and when I was at the company they were investigating the construction of a new e-commerce site, to replace the one they have. Long story short, nobody was able to dream up a way to build the system to how they wanted their catalog shopped.

I can try to describe the way, and if you have any way to shoehorn the thing into Ubercart I would love to hear about it.

Their basic structure looks something like this:
Men
Categories
Collections (of colors)
Styles
Color
Women
Categories
Collections (of colors)
Styles
Color

Categories are unique to men and women, meaning that no given category would appear in both men and women.

Collections are unique to men and women as well.
Collections are not unique to Categories however, meaning that any given Collection can appear in more than one Category.

Styles are not unique to Collections. The same style can be in more than one collection.

Colors are unique to Collections.
Colors are not unique to Men and Women.
Within a Collection (or a collection of colors if you will), not all Styles have all of the colors as an option.

There are no rules as to whether not unique things must or must not appear in anything else; meaning for example that while a particular style could fit into any collection, it does not have to. Furthermore, it might in the future.

Does this make sense?

Now, for the two methods of how it should be shopped:
First it is sorted by gender. People here are either shopping for men stuff, or shopping for women's stuff. Then:

METHOD 1 - By Collection

When shopping by collection, we should see all of the styles available in that collection. They should be able to be separated (sorted or filtered) by Category... remember that each collection can appear in more than one category.

When clicking into a style, we can see the options for colors. Changing color should load up different images, otherwise the rest of the information about that style remains constant.
-or-
We can filter by color and see which styles are available.

METHOD 2 - By Style or Category
We select a style or category, and are presented with a list of all of the possible colors (sorted by collection).
Picking a color changes the image, and presents us with information about that collection.

Bring on the questions, I know this might appear a bit vague. And thank you.
permalink #1 Mon, 04/28/2008 - 12:03
Ryan

Posts: 3744
 Joined: 08/07/2007
AdministratorHead Code Monkey - I eat bugs.

I don't have a full P.O.A. for you, but I know that the basics of what you're looking for can be handled with core taxonomy and a little creative use of Views. I'm not sure how familiar you are with either of these systems, but basically you'd setup taxonomy vocabularies (categories in the admin menu) for the categories, style, collection, and color that you can tag products with. I'm undecided on if I'd do gender as just the top level category or make the gender be a separate product class... in other words, don't just have a single product node type but have men's apparel and women's apparel be different product classes. This would let you filter products by node type, theme men's and women's product pages differently, setup default size attributes, etc. Also, you could have two separate categories vocabularies and only apply the men's vocabulary to the men's product type and women's to the women's type. However, if this makes it harder to administer/understand the catalog, I don't think it would be worth the trade-off.

With Views, you can create lists of products that can then be sorted by the terms you tag the products with from these various vocabularies. A default View might be a little rough for customers to navigate, but you can do some things to theme the display and use modules like the Views Bonus Pack to present products as a grid of thumbnails w/ prices and such.

So... this is just a few leads, but no full recommendation. I hope it helps. Sticking out tongue

permalink #2 Thu, 05/01/2008 - 12:15
m
Posts: 4
 Joined: 04/26/2008

It helps indeed. I think. Once I dive in I'll tell you how the waters feel.
But, the point about having two different product classes for the gender makes complete sense. Especially since they will definitely be themed differently. Can you imagine any other instance where it would make more sense to create additional classes?

I have used views quite a bit, so that should be suitable.

Thanks a bunch.

p.s. sorry for the late reply, the subscribe to comments function has failed me.

permalink #3 Thu, 05/01/2008 - 14:01
Ryan

Posts: 3744
 Joined: 08/07/2007
AdministratorHead Code Monkey - I eat bugs.

No prob on the reply... we updated our subscriptions module and I'm sure some stuff got lost in the shuffle. Sticking out tongue

Regarding additional classes... I guess the main thing I consider is if you need a group of products to have the same default attributes/options (you can do these on a per class basis), the same CCK fields, or as in your case, to all be themed alike depending on their class.