Linked products sort order issue

Hello all,

I have yet another issue which I've been trying to figure out for a while and can't seem to find a solution to, so I'm appealing to you guys again...

Basically, I'm just looking for a way to sort a list of linked products (if you go to my website at www. g n r w o r l d .com/ s t o r e under the Proshot DVDs section you will know what I mean). All the DVDs in that category are actually linked products from other categories as I'm trying to avoid duplicating them. However, if I change the sort order the way that I want the products to be displayed (which is in a chronological order from the newest DVDs in 2006 to the oldest ones in 1986) then the sort order also gets changed in the original categories which in turn messes up the original sort order, so it's a catch 22 here.

Anyway, hopefully I've been clear enough of what my problem is (if not, I can try explaining again), but any help on how to approach this issue would be much appreciated.

Anyone?

There is only one sort order and that is used when the sort method is based on sort order ...

You would need some customization or a new "sort method" to manage your sort order to work within all categories on Linked Products if you cannot use the standard sort methods ...

What sort of customization would that be? I am having this same issue (using 1.3.9c). I would like to be able to sort each category of linked products differently than the sort orders of the originals.

There isn't a simple method on the manual Sort Order for the Products when using Linked Products unless you really had a numbering strategy that allows for the Products in multiple categories to sort correctly ...

What are you trying to do with the Sort Order for the Products in each of the Categories that the other methods of sorting such as by name or price etc. cannot accomplish?

Well, I thank you for responding so quickly.

On reading some other posts, I see that perhaps I can be creative with the sort order. Thankfully we do not have many products, I can see how that would be more than daunting for a large site; but I might be able to get it to work.

What we have are educational classes, by date. I am putting the originals in a category by date, and then pulling out the same type of classes to be all together showing the different dates. So they all have the same sort order in the extra category where they are linked, and so by default are then being sorted by name, and the only change in their titles is the month and date name, so August comes before July and October after November. They are all the same price.

I think if I make August's classes all start with 8, say, starting at 81, and July with 71, October with 101, and November with 111, that it might fall into place. Can I do that more easily in phpMyAdmin, or do I have to go through in ZenCart each product one by one? I am just getting it set up, so I can do one by one if I must. Good to know now while I am getting set up!

Well, that did the trick. Except I think January of next year will have to start with 13.

Thanks for the update that this worked for you ... :smile:

Sometimes we don't want to have to think, after staring at files and folders and php and html for days! But thinking sometimes helps.

Or use something like
100701
100702
100801
100802

Yeah, you're right. The first two digits can be the year, the second two the month, and the last two the day (or in our case, just the number of the class that month, how I want them to list in the category for the month).

So January 2011 can be:
110101
110102

I think that will work nicely!

sometimes i likes to sits and thinks and sometimes i just likes to sits ... :cool:

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/images/smilies/smile.gifI use static pages to obtain SEO and have listings of all 1000 parts on them and have each one linked to Zen Cart Cart. All parts and prices are updated by one Excel data sheet so there is never any difference in part numbers or prices. If you are interested contact me. You can see how this works on kegman.net/test/index.html