Thread

I’m going to be working on a site soon that contains thousands of products. No e-commerce is done on the site, just displaying of products and specifications. Also need to be able to filter and search the products (preferably live with ajax).

Now entering in these thousands of products is my first concern. By hand this is a large task. Can expression engine work with an existing product database? Assuming that database is MySQL. Or is there a way to import a spreadsheet of data into a weblog?

Once my products are in a weblog, and I’m displaying my products on my category pages. Is it possible to have some real time search/filter options? To be able to do database queries on the fly? I don’t want to load 1000+ products onto a page if I don’t have to.

I’ve only used EE on one site before and it was a pretty simple use.

Here is a link to a plug=in that sounds like it will do what you want in terms of data import
http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/plugins/csvgrab/  I have not used it myself, but had it bookmarked for the day I might need it.

As for search filters, EE allows you to create your own SQL queries, so that is pretty straightforward.  The thing you will need to wrestle with a bit is the table(s) structure and field names, but that is more of a pain than a challenge.

Yeah I thought about custom Queries but with the table structure for EE its gonna be some work. Thanks for the plugin, that looks about what I was looking for.

I’d take a hard look at Solpace’s Importer module and the Super Search module. http://solspace.com