Can a product have more than one name?

This question is for Zen Cart 1.3.8 which has not been customised yet, and is not yet live.

Sometimes different people have different names for the same item. Some may say "tangerine" where others would say "Mandarin orange." Some may say "hood" where others would say "bonnet." Some may say "tin" where others would say "can."

Is there a way to have the system recognise more than one name for an item, such that people searching for the different names will all be shown the same ONE inventory item?

At first, I though linked items addressed this, but what I read tells me that such links are only to allow an item to appear in more than one category, and would not allow the item to appear more than once in that category's list.

The FAQ doesn't say anything about this that I could find, and neither does the list of add ons.

I did find ONE other message about this in the forum, and it was the same question that I am asking, but it has gone for almost two months without a reply.

No, this would require custom coding. You might be able to figure out a way to get the alternative terms into the product description.

A simple trick might be to place in the product description a DIV containing the alternate product names and position it way off the screen so its not visible, but they will be picked up when the description is searched.

I've seen some folks put additional keywords in the bottom of the description and make them the same color as the background and this works, but apparently, google considers this keyword spamming (text and bg same color) and gives you a whack for it.

PS: you won't get google-wacked for the first method because positioning things off the stage (visible web page) is a common css and dhtml method for achieving certain effects.

(do NOT make the DIV display:none;)

Yeah. One of the items in question is very commonly known by at least five different names, and that would add up to too many characters to cram it all into the one name field. In addition, the person whose website this is wants each of the names to appear separately in the catalog but still have the same product ID.

What I asked about searching was for the search feature that's part of Zen Cart, not search engines, but you're right: that would be yet another aspect to consider. If something can be done to achieve what was specified above, then CSS and SEO trickery would not only be unnecessary but undesirable.

Thanks for the answers, though. Let me see if I can implement some customisation that will make it work. If so, I'll look into releasing my modifications as an add on, but let's just see if it will even work at all.

labradors:

What I asked about searching was for the search feature that's part of Zen Cart
For Zen Cart's built in search you can add the additional words to the product's Keywords Meta tag.

Regards,
Christian.

Okay. Thanks. That can at least help a little while I try to implement true aliases.

labradors:

Okay. Thanks. That can at least help a little while I try to implement true aliases.
One solution would be to allow two or more products to share a single stock quantity. That would be messy to do as an Add On though as it would require core file changes.

Regards,
Christian.

Well, I still have to look more closely at the schema, but I was thinking more along the lines not of changing existing tables, but adding a table of aliases linked by product ID, then throwing in either a separate lookup or a join where needed. It's not something I can get to right away, though, so I'll have to look at the existing tables and code to see if that's even feasible.