Product order control required.

Can anyone help please?

I'm fairly new to zen cart but I've been setting up a new shop and I'm finding my way around things fairly easily - so far so good - until I have been loading all my products onto the site and noticed an issue I am not sure how to solve.

Basically, all my products titles have a name followed by a product code, e.g. 'Product Title PT0001', 'Product Title PT0002', 'Product Title PT0003' and so on.

The problem I am having is that when setting up a new products within the 'Catalog/Categories/Products' I am assigning a sort number to each product so that they will be listed everywhere according to this number. I am using multiples of 10 for each item so that I can insert a few more products in between each one in the future.

This seems to work fine in the list of products within the 'Catalog/Categories/Products' in the backend admin however, when I go to a product page and view the product counter (e.g. Product 1/72) and use the 'Previous' or 'Next' buttons, the order is all over the place. For instance, it might say Product 3/72 and the be showing product 37, and when next is clicked, it will jump to something like Product 56/72 and show product 4! There seems to be no logic to it.

If I view the products in a list view on the front end it all looks fine again.

I noticed when setting my attributes in the 'Catalog/Attributes Controller' that when I select a list of products from the Category options, that the list is not in the order I specified for those products when setting them up in 'Catalog/Categories/Products'.

They come up in this list as per the number assigned in the product counter on the front end, i.e. if it says Product 7/72 on the Product page (front end) it also appears as the 7th item on the list within the 'Catalog/Attributes Controller' list.

Sooooo (and thanks for sticking with it so far), the question is, how do I get everything to list as per the order I selected when setting up the product in 'Catalog/Categories/Products' originally? I don't necessarily want the product counter number to tie in with the actual product code as I will be adding more products in between current ones and I know this would knock that out, but I would like customers to be able to click through rodents in the sequence I want them to, i.e 1,2,3,4,… and not 1,5,34,65,23,…

Any help would be gratefully received. :smile:

Many thanks
Jo

What is the setting in your admin's Configuration->Layout Settings->Categories/Products Display Sort Order? It's towards the bottom of the screen for that set of configuration items.

Hi lat9, thank for replying.

Its currently set to '0 = Categories/Products Sort Order/Name

J.

There is another setting: Configuration->Product Info->Previous/Next: Sort Order that defaults to 1 (Product Name). Try changing that to 6 (Product Sort Order).

Hi lat9,

Brilliant, you're a star! That did the trick. So many settings - so little time, I must have overlooked that one.

Many many thanks.
Jo

I'm glad it's working the way you want. You're right, there are loads of configuration settings!

When you get some spare time, I suggest that you become familiar with all your admin's configurable items! If for no other reason, having reviewed them all once might jog your memory if you need to change something in the future!

Hi lat9,

Absolutely. I'm simply in the throws of trying to get my site up and selling at the moment but with a couple of other sites planned I really need to get up to speed with the admin side of Zen Cart. Good words of advice though.

Thanks again.
Jo