[ic] Departments

Jamie Neil interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
Sun May 18 19:43:00 2003


Hi All,

My client has requested that their store be split into departments, with
each one having it's own "home" page showing dept specific offers etc. The
number of depts is small (about 6), so I am tempted to just write a static
page for each one. However the programmer in me wants to write one page and
get the content from a database (must be a glutton for punishment).

I've considered a number of methods for implementing this and wondered if
anyone else who had tried/succeeded in doing the same thing might give me
some pointers:

1) Pass the dept id as a cgi variable, and use it to set a scratch value
that persists on following pages (used to highlight the corresponding dept
tab at the top). I've seen the cgi method done on a couple of IC sites.
Seems easy, but I'm concerned about search engine indexing.

2) Create the dept page as a search results page and pass the dept id as an
mv_value. Should mean that the pages will index ok, but it feels like kind
of I'm abusing the search method.

3) Use an action map to encode the dept id in the URL. Not sure I want to
open that can of worms...

As a future extension, they also want me to allow "specialist" shops to be
created. These are essentially the same as the departments, but they can
contain non-exclusive groups of products. For example mens and ladies shops
may contain a common set of products. At the moment I'm a bit stumped on
this one, so any suggestions are gratefully recieved.

Thanks,

Jamie Neil
Versado I.T. Services Ltd.