Forums / Setup & design / Designing Complicated E-Commerce System: Need Suggestions

Designing Complicated E-Commerce System: Need Suggestions

Author Message

Alex Jones

Monday 30 June 2003 2:32:35 pm

At this point I am pretty confident that eZ publish meets our needs, but I could really use some quality answers and feedback on how best to set up the forms for our content editors to fill out. We have a lot of attributes that may apply to a product and we have several areas where we need to address several models of a product on a single page (and thus in a single form), so this can get a bit confusing.

List of Possible Form Fields:
- Model Name (text line)
- Model Number (text line)
- Maker (text line)
- Designer (text line)
- Short Description (XML text field)
- Long Description (XML text field)
- Product Price (price)
- Image (image)
- Image Letter Assignment (text line) - if an image has multiple models each is assigned a letter to tie it to the description.
- Specs - There will be around 15 specs to fill out per model
- In Stock (check box)
- New Item - I'm not sure if this is needed or not. Basically, we will have a page of 'New Items' which I would like to be automated to prune itself as needed in addition to automatically adding recently entered items. - New Item Expiration Date - If I can't set up eZ publish to auto-expire items from the New Item area I need to indicate when it should be removed.
- Specials - What is the easiest way to manage an item's association with multiple specials? I would prefer to avoid adding multiple fields to the item form to account for each special it might be a part of.
- Clearance Item (check box)
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Alternate Models
As Mentioned above we might have several models to choose from, each of which needs to include the following fields.

- Alternate Model Name (text line)
- Alternate Model Image (image)
- Alternate Model Description
- Alternate Model Specs - There will be around 15 specs to fill out per model

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Other Fields, not associated with any one model on the page.
- Call Outs
Call outs are little blurbs such as 'Exclusive' or 'Special'. We will need three possible call outs per model.

- Publish (check box)
- Publish Date (datetime field)

So, is it possible to set up a multi-part form that would break this down into smaller chunks? If so how easy is it to add the logic to allow the editor to select that they need to add four alternate models and have the system present a page with all of the appropriate fields? If there aren't any alternate models I would prefer that they are not faced with any fields not relating to the primary model.

Any ideas on how to simplify the form (without losing fields) would be greatly appreciated!

Alex

Alex
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