Online Catalog

Vision Statement

Online Catalog package provides the browsing part of a traditional ecommerce service. Emphasis on presentation and search engine optimization. Shopping basket functions are separate.

Requirements

• ability to choose item(s) using a specifications configurator (see PDM book pg 319).
• a templating system similar to the one for products in ecommerce (editable by package admins etc.)  see ecks-templates
  
• handle heavy traffic from spidering by serving statically generated files (that don't require connects to the db), where the files are updated from the db when relevant data is changed

Implementation Notes

Discussions: health reference context

When to update the static files? ... maybe via scheduled proc or an update-proc is called when the data is edited or new pages added..

This package may best be handled by creating special templates in XoWiki.

Feature requests

A CONFIGURATOR USE CASE: add a table of tables (use spreadsheet package) that holds product/service/item specifications or descriptions etc . Make a UI that will allow similarly categorized items to be compared by values in the same table. The categories can span any number of columns, with the most significant one(s) (if any) listed first. This feature will allow users to "burrow" into a product type (or other item set) with increasing definition of "type" attributes until a specfic table (within the table of tables ie spreadsheet) is identified, where upon the table of items will be listed, sorted and filtered using list builder UI. (The request from OpenACS.org bug 22