Customizing the Products All listing

[rstevenson]

Hi folk,

I'd like to modify the Products All listing so it looks exactly like the regular products listing. (Why it's so different is just one of those How high is the sky? questions that it ain't worth asking.)

I looked at the two relevant files in includes/templates/My_template/templates -- that is: tpl_modules_products_all_listing.php and tpl_modules_product_listing.php -- and decided I'd better not just copy the regular one and replace the All one. That seemed like a Really Bad Idea. The two files are wildly different in structure and even size, the regular one having 66 lines and the All one having 216 lines.

So, I need some help from the PHP savvy. First, is it possible to do that sort of wholesale replacement -- taking care to make sure the references out of the file are correct. Or is there some other method to do what I want?

To broaden the issue: if I ever decide to use the New Products or Specials or any of the other product listings, I'd also want them to look the same, and to be able to control all of them at once from the stylesheet and from admin. (I honestly can't imagine any reason for the lists to be different, but maybe I lack imagination.) So I guess a general solution would be to use the tpl_modules_product_listing.php file to control all product listing tasks in my store.

Any hints, help or laughs greatly appreciated.

Rob

[Kim]

Rob -

Is this an urgent need? The listings (all 5) are scheduled for "standardization" and improvements soon (1.4).

[rstevenson]

No rush. This afternoon would be fine. ;-)

Any chance I can beta test the new layouts? My 1.3.7 store is fairly standard, in the sense that I haven't applied any major layout breaking mods. It's the wholesale one in my sig below. (And I have a local copy running in MAMP to experiment with before applying it to my live store.)

Rob

[gjh42]

"(I honestly can't imagine any reason for the lists to be different, but maybe I lack imagination.)"

One possibility is for an all listing that is a stripped version (say just name, price & buy now) to run through the whole list quickly...
Some businesses might really want this.

[rstevenson]

True, but that's the sort of thing that could be done with a switch in admin and some stylesheet tweaks.

There have been forum threads that ask for more than one field for product description, so you could have, for example, a field for brief description, then one for full text description and another for technical details or whatever. And these could be applied to one or more of the list types via admin. Which I hope is what Kim is referring to above.

Can't wait for 1.4.....

Rob

[gjh42]

I guess you were talking about reasons for the listing file structures to be different... there, I fully agree with you (and so do the devs, as they are going to standardize the structures).