Product Catalog

Tech Specs

[wfernley]

Hi :)

I was curious if anyone could explain to me how I could add a Technical Specifications section to my product catalog.

I want the specs for each product to be listed under my description, but the key is I want them listed and not displayed as a paragraph. Would I need to have a table for each spec or is there a way I can create one entry where it has all the specs for a specific product and lists them instead of just making them all bunched together in a paragraph.

Example...

- 50mb Memory
- 30GB Hard Drive
- 1.6 GHZ Processor

Instead of...

- 50mb Memory - 30GB Hard Drive - 1.6 GHZ Processor.

Thanks for your help :)

Wes

[Mark_A]

Come on this kind of thing is basic html how about looking it up a bit or viewing source on some web pages that do similar things before posting questions like this eh :-)?

something like

<UL>
<LI>50mb Memory</LI>
<LI>30GB Hard Drive</LI>
<LI>1.6 GHZ Processor </LI>
</UL>

or just use <br> tags between them, or <p> tags broken up with <br> tags even .. so many different ways to achieve same visual result ..

[wfernley]

haha, im so sorry, I forgot to add something and don't ask me why I forgot - it just happens to be the most important factor of this whole question.

The entry I was speaking of is from a MySQL database. So basically, is there any way I can order information from a MySQL database like an unordered list?

Sorry I can't believe I forgot that :P

Thanks though :)

Wes

[Mark_A]

Hi Wes well I kinda figured that it would be out of a dbase :-) being in ecommerce ..

Its fun but trouble often starts when its primarily a horisontal data set and you want it to be vertical, speaking in a tables sort of way ..

You could store each variable in a seperate field in a flat table .. then simply process the fields to produce such an output .. start with the openning UL tag / and first LI tag where data is present insert closing LI tags after each cell containing data till the first empty cell then insert the closing UL tag ..

There are lots of other ways I am sure ..

BTW whats wrong with creating a small table of it?

Is it a single flat table or is the data in a related table?

[wfernley]

Well I was just wondering if there would be an easier way of doing it. I was thinking that having like 150 products to start - each with a minimum of 8 specs is 1200 entries in a DB when you might be able to have just 150 entries.

I wonder if it is possible to have each entry have the specs but in HTML with tables included in the code. So basically it just adds the code in to the page, and then HTML just does its table thing.

I hate how I suck at explaining things :P

[Mark_A]

Ok .. can of course insert whatever you like in fields assuming their formatting will cope with it ..

but typing repetitive table code into 150 fields sounds like a waste of time to me also :-)

How about you get the inserters ..

- whoever will type the data in the first place into digital format

to type it into seperate fields related to the part number - so for part nr 1 they type data 1 then tab - data 2 then tab - data three etc .. then next record .. till end

then you run a routine / query / macro whatever to build whatever html coding you want for display purposes round these data entries and shove the resulting code into one cell in the output table?

I have done similar before .. get raw data from a company system in whatever format it exists then process it into sub sets of pre-formatted content for an output html page.

[danieljean]

wfernley- I used some of the oscommerce concepts. Products can have n attributes, which each have 1 attribute type and 1 attribute value.

You can then sort products based on attribute type Hard Drive Size or RAM Size.