Product Category Based Upon Product Types

[lingray]

Hello,

Not sure if this has been answered elsewhere but I couldn't find it.

Lets say you had a store that sold music and you had organised your categories on the left by band. So each band has its own category with different albums in each category. Then the decision was made to sell t-shirts for various bands but you wanted to keep both entities separate.

Question: Could you have a category sidebox for music and another for t-shirts if you have created the different product types and differentiated the category in the admin area by product type?

This is probably a really simple one but I'm struggling to find a solution.

Thanks

[lingray]

I find it hard to believe that there is no way of doing this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[DrByte]

Yes, you could do that. The documents_category sidebox is an example of limiting its content based on product type. You could use that as inspiration for your custom coding.

[stevesh]

Well, the Zencart default demo products include three different product types (Product - General, Document - General and Music General), and each has its own 'categories' sidebox, so I guess it would be possible using those, with the tshirts under Products - General and the music under Music - General.

The bad news is that, so far as I know, you can't change the product type once the product is created, so you would need to re-enter all your music, or leave the music as Product - General and rename Documents - General for the tshirts.

[lingray]

Thanks so much for taking the time to reply. I will definitely read up on those avenues and hopefully get this sorted!

Thanks GUYS!!!

[lingray]

Right I have noticed an issue with the way Product Types are handled. Thought I'd post here just in case any body have the same issue.

I tried to get another sidebox working based upon what DrByte said above.

When I enabled the sidebox and changed the id for my new product type I got a Non-Object error from the category_tree class. This was actually relating to the database object within the class. It appears to have been being caused due to an error in SQL query on Line 25

$sql = "select type_master_type from " . TABLE_PRODUCT_TYPES . " where type_master_type = " . $product_type . ""; 

Changing the SQL query to this resolves the issue:

$sql = "select type_id from " . TABLE_PRODUCT_TYPES . " where type_master_type = " . $product_type . ""; 

Oh and also change the following:

$master_type = $master_type_result->fields['type_master_type']; 

For:

$master_type = $master_type_result->fields['type_id']; 

This appears to have resolved the issue for me!