Product Finder: multiple category drop-downs

[ianhg]

Hi, we use this contribution as sidebox in a website with thousends of motorbike spare parts and the huge amount of categories and products results in a massive production of this query:

SELECT COUNT( * ) AS total
FROM products p, products_to_categories p2c

And as you can imagine website gets slower and slower when there are many customers.

Is there a way to avoid the check to see if there are products in the categories? We have no empty categories, so it's useless for us and in some case we're so slow that I have to remove the sidebox for a while..

Thanks!!

Have you thought about changing your hosting? It would seem that for ecommerce a vps hosting package would help speed issues. Hosting on a cluster puts large demands MySQL databases and can be slow from experience vps hosting is much quicker.

[Design75]

Have you thought about changing your hosting? It would seem that for ecommerce a vps hosting package would help speed issues. Hosting on a cluster puts large demands MySQL databases and can be slow from experience vps hosting is much quicker.

You do not need vps, but a hosting company that knows what it is doing.

[CPTESS]

Has anybody experienced the 2nd box NOT dynamically populate after the first box has been selected?
I have a selection to pick from in the first box, and when I select the 2nd box I get a jscript_jquery.js error.
It says permission denied
Code:0 Line:33 Char:6000
in the /jscript/jscript_jquery.js file location.
Line 33 = arrayVar=new Array();
And I have cut a snip out of the jscript_model_year.php file.

var modelList=function model_list(){
	                        var baseDirectory=document.getElementById("basemodulepath").value;
							var cPath=document.getElementById("cPath").value;
						    $.ajax({
                            type: 'POST',
                            url:baseDirectory+"modellist.php",
                            data:"cPath="+cPath+"&my=1",
                            success: function(data){
												// un comment this to see the values that come thru 
								                //alert(data);
												if(data!=""){
							                    arrayVar=new Array();
							                     arrayVar=data.split("|");
												 arrayVarId=new Array();
												 arrayVarId=arrayVar[0].split("^");
												 arrayVarName=new Array();
												 arrayVarName=arrayVar[1].split("^");
												 $('#select_model').html("");

[Liamv]

For some reason when we were looking to implement a Make Model Year drop down box filter on our web site I didn't find this thread. So perhaps we did this the hard way?

We have recently implemented a new feature on our web site that allows filtered searching by Make Year and Model via drop down boxes.

We developed our own ZenCart template (from an existing one) and then got a third party to add a Make Year Model drop down filter for us.

It seems to have the same functionality as the module in this thread but the administration and set up is very different. I am not sure whether what we have is better or worse - happy to answer any questions if anyone wants to compare the two - but I haven't played with the contribution mentioned previously in this thread.

It has been created by Zen4me.com for us (at a very reasonable cost) and we understand that now they have done the hard work of develping it from scratch for us that they are going to make it available to other customers as well at a cheaper price. We are happy and keen for other customers to also use this development as it will ensure that new features etc will be developed.

How it works.

You can visit www.FastBikeGear to see it in action.

Rather than have to assign every one of our thousands of products manually one by one to a Make Model Year Zen4me was able to import a spreadsheet that we gave them with the Make Model and Year Assignments for every product. (However the import process wasn't perfect and some products did not get assigned even though we had made assignments in the spread sheet - which is very frustrating)

On an ongoing basis, when you add a new product at the bottom of the page where you add the product description price etc you assign the product to one or more Make(s), Model(s) and Yeas(s) from a pre-established list of Make, Model and Years. This feature works really well and makes it fast and easy to administer.

Pre-establihed list of Make Model and Years. We were able to supply the developers with a Make Model Year spread sheet which they imported into the site for us. Through the Admin via tab called Extras we can add/edit new Make Model and Years as required on an ongoing basis.

It's early days yet (we have only be using it for a couple of weeks) and the code still needs some development to improve the administration functions.

Please feel free to ask me questions on this or contact via this thread or contact Donny at [email protected]

So as not to hijack this thread or get it off track I have started another thread here:

http://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.p...ake-Model-Year

[torvista]

So as not to hijack this thread or get it off track I have started another thread here:

Since some relevant questions have been asked in this other thread
http://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.p...ake-Model-Year

about my use of this mod at www dot motorvista dot es, I have decided to answer them here as they are relevant to this thread, not the other one!

Steve it would seem that the way you are doing this is to create hidden categroies for each Make of bike and then create a subcategory for each model and then a further sub categor for each year of bike and then assign new products to the relevant year of bike category?

The Bike Make->Model->Year category structure is not hidden as such, its just only accessable through the drop down to save menu space.

My Top-level categories are:
1 - Manufacturers->where subcats are logical product families as makes sense to ME for ordering purposes, linking to an ERP etc. This is like a reference list for us, the admins. It is accessible but not really subdivided to help people find stuff specific to their bike. This is the master categories section for all products.

All products are then linked as required to 2) Products and 3) Your Bike->Model->Year categories.
--------

2 - Products->The traditional menu of types of products.
---------
3 - Your Bike->Accessible through the drop-down only.
---------

It would also seem that you could then use EZ pages to update this information?

No idea, never used EZ pages.

I have made enormous spreadsheets in Openoffice Calc (better charset handling than Excel) for each group of products where all the product information in both languages is built from the manufacturers (often sloppy) data, chunks of common texts and lots of IF and SUBSTITUTE statements, which I import with Apsona for initial creation and subsequent updates for price.

I also use boilerplate text a lot:
http://www.thatsoftwareguy.com/zenca...scription.html
which has recently become a mod for download.

A disadvantage with your solution might be if a product fits multiple products you need to copy it to multiple years which would be cumbersome through the admin.
and then when you drill down to a single product it is harder to see at a galnce what models and years the product is assigned to

We have a matrix/list at the bottom of each product description page in the admin which makes product assignments very fast and displays a complete list of all the MMY that a product is assigned to. However as yet we can not simply copy this list of assignments to another product.

Yes its immensely tedious to create a category tree of all the Bike Make->Model->Year categories and of course many products have to be multiple-linked/copied to many ->Year categories but I had Conor (CEON, RIP) improve the stock Zen Cart products-to-categories page to show all the defined categories for a product, in alphabetical order, filtered by a drop-down and add the functionality to copy all linked products from one category into another category, copy all a products category links to another product as described in this thread:
http://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.p...Manager-Sorted
which is frankly, awsome!

So you can easily see at a glance for any product, to where it is linked, and it does the copying functionality you are missing.

With that, and Ajeh's Multiple product-copy mod
http://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.p...Move-Delete%29

you are covered for almost any type of copying you wish to do.
I would love to see them both combined and integrated into the core, I couldn't manage my shop structure without them.

[Jerr]

Posting to update my test site link.
I moved to a free site because the company I was building the site for backed out of the deal.

I had to rebuild it so I am still fine tuning it.
http://zencartdemo.bugs3.com/zencart/

[Opal]

Does anyone know if this works on zen cart 1.5.0? and if it didn't would creating a hidden category and linking all categories to it to make them show in multiple categories work? Thank you.

[torvista]

Does anyone know if this works on zen cart 1.5.0?

Yes it does.

would creating a hidden category and linking all categories to it to make them show in multiple categories work?

Yes. The linked products would display.

[Opal]

Thank you!

[Opal]

I'm using it with this: http://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=1228 (Multiple Categories Link Manager-Sorted) but when I click 'display' to show the next product to link it just takes me back to the admin home page :/ Any ideas as to what has gone wrong? Basically I need something that will make all categories show in the multiple lnks manager whether they have an item in it or not ;) Thank you :)