Hello Gilles,
I started with the child and parent categories as you suggested. This will take some time because I don't have that much time. I'm usually pretty late at home from my work...
Anyway, I did not encounter any problem with the child and parent categories; I just created the childs and in the product (fish) I only shifted the category from "Fish" (Parent) to the child (familyname category). Finding the proper discriptions on Wiki for the family and fish descriptions takes the greater part of the time...
May I also suggest an enhancement for the Store module in this post?
I had a client who tried to setup the store for his liquer shop. He sells all kind of whiskeys, beer, wines and other spiritual drinks, and limonade to ;)
His problem in the end was that he had to price and regularly re-price all his products one by one, while he needs to do this on a weekly basis. He gets his prices from his suppliers by e-mail as an Excel attatchment. So I tried to create a simple module to read this Excel sheet and update the product prices. This did not work because I don't know enough from the store module, nor do I know enough from reading and writing Excel records into a DNN (store) database. (Idit get some way, but I had to abandon...) So I lost this client because maintaining the products in his Store module was tedious and very time-consuming. He went for an internet store that does work with Excel support...
I think this ommission of functionality will be the main reason why users, in the end, wil stop using this Store module; to much handlin when lots of product are to be maintained.
What I (my customers) need in general is a easy way to manage large bulk of product information. This must be accomplished by using an Excelsheet in witch is stored:
- New products, with all the propertie needed in the Store module (Name, Category, price, logistic information and so on) must be read and write into the Store
- Existing products must be upgraded based on the product key. Like description, category/sub-category price, logistic information etcetera.
- Existing products in the store must be deleted based on the product key by reading the Excel sheet, based on a "Delete" mark in a specail Excel column.
I think there has to be a function that creates an Excel template sheet what, in turn, should be used by the Store administrator as am importsheet to insert, update or delete large quantities of products. I can write a more detailed functional design if you want me to, but then again, I need to be pretty sure that this function will be developed. I will be more than happy to test this new function along the pat of development......
By the way, I did think about using the Module Export and Import funtion.... I used it when I had to setup my teststore to get it quickly filled with categories and products... The fluke is that when you import twice, the atategories and products are doubled! And again, and again.... The import function simply adds the same store products again, and the recovery (getting rid of the double records) took me ages.... Thereby, XML files are not that easy to maintain for ordinary users and store administrators. Excel is much easier to handle....
Please let me know.
You can mail me if that's more convenient...
jos.richters@visualdata.nl
Cheers, Jos