[ic] Departments

[Joshua Lavin]

On Sunday, May 18, 2003, at 06:43  PM, Jamie Neil wrote:

> 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.

We use departments, but our method is just adding another column to the 
products database. Makes it real easy to do searches based on 
department:

se=Pants/sf=Description/se=Clothing/sf=Department

>
> 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.

I use the mv_value quite a bit for custom headers, too.

>
> 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.
>

For your specialist shops, you might add yet another column to products.

Regards,
Josh