Assortment of Ideas

[Kelvin]

Eric posted this: http://dukapress.org/blog/2010/12/16/what-would-you-like-to-see-in-dukapress/comment-page-2/#comment-14250

Hi, I’ve been using DukaPress on a few client sites, tearing it up and rewriting the css to suit the clients needs. Everyone wants something different. On a recent site I found myself wasting a lot of time creating what DukaPress didn’t offer, so here are some thoughts on what can be useful.
Displaying the product on the checkout.
Adding the product code or inventory number. Some sites have so much inventory that it’s faster to look it up by code instead of name.
A way to display collections for products such as jewelry.
Imagine you have earring that also go well with a necklace and bracelet. You could add a grid at the bottom of the product page and then tell it to display specific items only. Lot of work. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to display 3 or 4 pictures of different products that make a collection on the same page? Then you’d have to have a way to add each item separately or as a whole.
A return button. When you’re looking at the product detail page there’s no way other then clicking the return button to get you back to the previous page.
A little more style or at least a breakdown of the templates so we can write our own filters and functions.
Recently I has someone ask if there was a way to set up “bidding” for their one of a kind artwork. Is there a way to add this functionality? Is there a way to set this up with cap limitation? Starting bids? Silent auctions?
And lastly, perhaps a different image display for the single page. Having the images available in a carousel style gallery on the detail page might be a little more attractive.
If these questions have already been addressed, I’m new and my apologies. If they have answers, point them out to me so I can look into them please.

[Kelvin]

Responses:

1. Displaying the product on the checkout.
I presume you mean an image of the product? How would you want this to look/work like?

2. Adding the product code or inventory number. Some sites have so much inventory that it’s faster to look it up by code instead of name.
Actually currently DukaPress does do this, to some extent. For example, when a purchase via PayPal is made, you’ll see that the “Product ID” on PayPal’s end is indeed displayed as the post ID.

Anyway, that aside, it should be fairly easy to do this. We need to add a “SKU” custom field. It would then be possibly to search by SKU since it is possible to include custom fields in WordPress queries of posts. What do you think?

3.A way to display collections for products such as jewelry.
Imagine you have earring that also go well with a necklace and bracelet. You could add a grid at the bottom of the product page and then tell it to display specific items only. Lot of work. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to display 3 or 4 pictures of different products that make a collection on the same page? Then you’d have to have a way to add each item separately or as a whole.

Can you please describe this a little more? Do you mean related products (i.e. via categories), or groups of products (i.e. a shirt, tie, and a pair of trousers that make up a suit)

4. A return button. When you’re looking at the product detail page there’s no way other then clicking the return button to get you back to the previous page.

Thanks for this idea. I think it is something fairly possible. Different pages have different URLS e.g. http://timamu.com/?dpage=2 would be for the second page in the list view of products. SO it should be possible to build a new function that takes you back to the last URL you visited on the site.

BUT it will not work (at least not in this form) if you have “random” as your product order method of choice because when you go back to the page, the product order is changed. 😛 Introduces some complexity…

5. A little more style or at least a breakdown of the templates so we can write our own filters and functions.
Thanks for this. We’re starting to work on thsi, thanks to you.

6. Recently I has someone ask if there was a way to set up “bidding” for their one of a kind artwork. Is there a way to add this functionality? Is there a way to set this up with cap limitation? Starting bids? Silent auctions?
Hmm this would have to made as a complete addon for DukaPress. None of the tools to do this easily exist in DukaPress right now. 🙁 But I do believe it is something do-able.

7. And lastly, perhaps a different image display for the single page. Having the images available in a carousel style gallery on the detail page might be a little more attractive.

Hmm, would it be acceptable to take a standard “slideshow” type plugin that works with shortcodes and somehow make it run a slideshow of the product’s attached images?

[Eric]

Sorry to take so long to get back to you. I’ve been redoing the site and trying to implement the clients ideas. If you want to see what I’ve done with the DukaPress go to http://www.unbeadables.com/ to check out the layout.
There are still some things I haven’t been able to do yet and would like some pointers.

I still haven’t figured out how to display the products in the checkout. Is it just a matter of adding the shortcode with display in it?
I’ve managed to have each page get it’s own background. The problem that I ran into is that when you go to the items detail single page, I can’t call up the parent ID for the category so that it uses that color template.
It’s a whole nother language to me that I’m learning as fast as I can.

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