From post 3:Not that it seems practical for your particular situation...Quote:
... However, Zen Cart does have a product sort order field for each product that is used in some places to allow site owners to override the normal ordering.
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From post 3:Not that it seems practical for your particular situation...Quote:
... However, Zen Cart does have a product sort order field for each product that is used in some places to allow site owners to override the normal ordering.
No logic in this... The user STILL has to put in what amounts to a sort order. Why put in a function that is ALREADY there? It's like putting a second engine into a car, and running both at the same time... :wacko:Quote:
I wonder if an add-on could be built (or a core improvement) that could simply add an extra field to the title for numbers? If the field was populated it'd be added to the end of the title (and would be the secondary sorting criteria). Of course, I have no idea how to construct such a thing but one can dream.
Come to think of it, the sort orders probably could be effectively used for your case, provided each title is in its own category. For Comic A #1 you would enter a sort order of 1, and for Comic A #23 you would enter sort order 23. As long as only Comic A is in the category, there will never be confusion in display or thought required in product entry. It would probably be possible to semi-automate converting your current products exported to a spreadsheet, as mentioned by schoolboy.
In my case the limitations of the numerical sorting only impact about a third of my products. I'm already adding an issue number to most products but it would save me from having to also add a sort number to every product. The issue number and sort number would be one and the same.
My thinking is that this add-on/improvement would only kick in for products for which that extra field is populated. So every entry with "Super Fun Comics" as a title would sort itself by the number field and wouldn't impact the rest of the products.
Also, it seems to me the built-in sort feature is most useful for a product line that's fairly static (or for stores with a small number of products). Mine isn't, which means I have to be clever and space the sort numbers by 5s or 10s and then when I add a new listing I have to check the place where it goes to figure out what the sort number will be. Seems like more trouble/time than it's worth. If I'm mistaken about how it works then somebody please let me know.
The sort order is a property of the product. If it is linked to multiple categories, it would appear the same in all of them. This could obviously be an issue if you have different product lines combined in one category. How many different titles do you have (more or less)? How many issues of one title do you typically have in stock?
Since the same issue would always get the same sort order, you wouldn't need to keep track of which one sold etc. If you had two of one issue, they would have the same sort order and would appear one after the other.
If you need to keep different titles in one category, you might assign Title A a sort prefix of 10 and Title B a sort prefix of 20, giving sort orders like 10001, 10033, 10234, 20005, 20789, etc. This is probably getting too much more complex than just adding leading zeros to the issue number in the product name.
Sorry for being so slow to reply, Glenn. I think you're right, that would be getting a bit more complicated than I want to deal with. I appreciate the effort though, and thanks for the info!
I had a similar problem recently and came to the conclusion that to minimise the long-term maintenance time, the most efficient way was to pad the numbers with leading zeros as per post#7 and let things work naturally forevermore. Its no great hassle to export (I use Apsona) to a spreadsheet, do the updating and import again. Once it's done it's done and you can forget about it.