Hello everyone.
I decided to make a list and a poll (I hope it's still active when you read this) of extensions that people would like to see or to have perfected.
Here is the the short list I came up with.
Save a product as pdf
Tree like sitemap
Live chat
Yahoo weather widget
Multilanguage FAQ (with categories)
Product accessories
Price based on dimensions (WxHxD)
Multi-language e-mail templates
If you have any other ideas please put them here and maybe you will get that extension.
Please do not suggest online payment extensions.
Marius.
I'd love a widget/extension that would allow you to pick a product from within a pop-up - much like how the catalog product link widget does it - i.e with a graphical tree structure on the left showing the categories and a grid based system on the right displaying the products within the chosen category.
ReplyDeleteI did have a go at trying to reverse engineer the widget, but it became too complex.
All the currently available extensions dont seem to quite cut it - unless I've missed one...
Thanks,
Ian
hi Ian
ReplyDeleteWhat you are describing is basically a filter by category in the product widgets.
I'm not sure if this is really relevant for the widgets.
I don't think this will bring a lot of business value to a website. Usually when you want to add a product as a widget you already know what product you need and you can search it by sku or name. (or maybe I misunderstood something from your comment. If I did please explain more).
Don't get me wrong, every suggestion posted here will go on a list of possible extensions, but this one will not be top priority.
Cheers,
Marius.
Hi Marius,
ReplyDeleteSorry I missed your reply until now. I may also have misunderstood your reply, but here's my thinking...
Lets say that I want to create a custom module that simply shows a filtered collection of products to the user. Unless I'm mistaken, something like this is usually done by adding an extra attribute to the system/product that basically acts as a flag indicating whether or not the chosen product should be included with the custom module - by means of using it in a filter. (Would you agree with this?)
In order to set this up on the admin side, the admin user would have to find each product (probably my means of the 'catalog - manage product' admin menu option) and set the flag/attribute manually. Having maybe set a couple, they would then have to navigate to their admin custom module grid to see what they have already added. (Again, would you agree with this?)
Its just my opinion, but I would have thought that it would be easier for the store owner to use the backend admin custom module to go to their custom data grid, which would show any products already listed for their custom module, and then add another product (from within the SAME page/custom admin section) by means of clicking on a button which would pop-up the admin form that you currently see behind the 'select product' button on the 'catalog product link widget'. That way, the store owner could select any relevant products (in much the same way as before) and then see all of their choices aftering clicking on the 'ok' button, without navigating elsewhere. (Did that make sense, any thoughts?)
Also by implementing it this way, instead of adding an extra attribute to every product, you could in fact create a new custom table that would simply hold the product id of each product that should be included with the custom module. The custom admin data grid could then query this table and display all related products. Again its just my opinion but although this would require a little further work upfront, I'd say its a much cleaner implementation. If you wanted to remove the module, you could just delete it and then delete the associated custom table - you wouldnt leave unnecessary attributes lying around...
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this Marius, maybe I've missed something and the way that I first described isnt the common way of doing it? If you do reply, could you give me a nod at ian_gallimore@yahoo.com so that I dont miss your reply.
Thanks,
Ian
Hello Ian. This sound like a more elaborate idea :). I tried something similar before. One customer wanted a 'Top 10' module on his website. At first I took an approach similar to yours, creating a new module and selecting products from a grid and adding them in a separate table. But I changed my mind a little later, because you can do this without an admin section in your module. You can add a new flag attribute (just like you said) and instead of editing the products one by one to set this flag, you can use the 'Update attribtues' feature in the Magento backed for the product grid and modify all of them at once. In order to see what product has the flag set to 'yes' I added an other column in the product grid. This way you can add as many attributes for as many lists as you want. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you, With a separate module it's easier to manage the lists in admin, but from the performance point of view it's better with a new attribute. You can add the attribute in the flat tables also and this way you avoid additional table joins. I admin that the down side of my approach is that is harder to remove the module, but it's still do-able.
ReplyDeleteBut, do you won't be mad at me I will add your suggestion to my list of possible extensions and if/when I will implement this your name will be added in the description because it was your idea. :)