Hi,

I wonder if anyone can help with a little question?

In one of my earlier posts I mentioned that I was setting up a product catalogue weblog with the following fields:

- Product Name (text input)
- Product Description (textarea)
- Product Type (dropdown)
- Product Picture(s)
- Product PDF(s) (manuals, product specs, etc)
- User Voting

I’ve done this but am now thinking about my sites navigation. I have a keyword search for products and this works fine but I also want to use a browse option as well.

Basically I’m trying to achieve this…. If a user clicks ‘Browse’ in the nav menu they are taken to a page that has a list of product types. The user can then select a product type and they will then see related products of that type.

At the moment I have this:

This just gives me a list of products. This was fine but now I want to break the list down by product type.

So, been searching on this forum and reading documentation etc. to find a solution. Best I could come up with is this (product_type is a weblog field that is a dropdown list):

However, this doesn’t work at all and I get no output at all. If I use the following:

It outputs all entries with no selection at all.

Any ideas? Where am I going wrong?

thanks,

Ste

Why not simply use categories to organize your products by type (where each category corresponds with a product type)?

BTW, love the avatar.

opuszine - 15 June 2007 10:27 AM

BTW, love the avatar.

thanks

I’d thought about using categories and will perhaps use them. I just wanted to try and avoid the users having to select the ‘categories’ tab when adding a new product and just use the weblog fields. I know it’s not really a big deal but I’m just concerned that people will sometimes forget to do it!

sm9 - 15 June 2007 08:05 AM

Any ideas? Where am I going wrong?

Is “product_type” a custom field?  If so, you’ll want to change the “disable” attribute in your {exp:weblog:entries} to “pagination|categories|member_data|trackbacks”.  Right now, “custom_fields” is being disabled, which means that you can’t use any custom fields for anything, including sorting and displaying.

Still think categories would be the ideal way to go.  Sure, there’s a little more of a learning curve for your users, but I’d think the resulting flexibility would be worth it.

Schoolboy error on my part there! 

I think i’m going to go with the conditional selection for now but take you point about the categories. The first phase of the project is quite small scale so may revise things during phase two.