Products by Hierarchy and Categories or just Hierarchy

[vigor]

Hi,

Currently building an e-commerce shop with the products module and wondering what you think the best way to lay out products would be?

1. Using top level hierarchy and then categories?

Hierarchy 1
>>Category 1
>>Category 2
Hierarchy 2
>>Category 3
>>Category 4

or

2. Just hierarchies?

Hierarchy 1
>>Sub Hierarchy 3
>>Sub Hierarchy 4
Hierarchy 2
>>Sub Hierarchy 5
>>Sub Hierarchy 6

Thanks

[applejack]

All depends on what structure you need and how to display categories, sub categories, products etc based upon various hierarchies and search capabilities. If you use hierarchies a product can only belong to that one top level hierarchy whereas categories you can assign it to multiple.

You can also use custom fields as categories but beware you can only search one custom field at a time unless you also start re-writing the smarty logic in the templates which can start getting a bit messy.

See this as an example

https://yanksair.com/collection/

The drop downs in the search use custom fields.

P.S. There are lots of bugs in v.1.18+ of the products module and also running any version on CMS 1.11+

[vigor]

Thanks for the reply. Is it possible to order the categories in a specific order other than alphabetical? Normally alphabetical would be good but the website I'm building is for clothing for babies so they need to custom order the list.

Current list
0 - 3 Months (2)
1 - 2 Years (2)
2 - 3 Years (2)
3 - 5 Years (1)
3 - 6 Months (2)
6 - 9 Months (2)
9 - 12 Months (2)

But What I need is the months first so it goes in proper order like below.

0 - 3 Months (2)
3 - 6 Months (2)
6 - 9 Months (2)
9 - 12 Months (2)
1 - 2 Years (2)
2 - 3 Years (2)
3 - 5 Years (1)

Thanks Again

[applejack]

You can do that using hierarchies and custom fields can't remember if you can also using categories you would have to try.

[vigor]

Thanks. I think I'll stick with hierarchies for now and sub hierarchies as the client only wants 1 product in 1 category / hierarchy for now. Thanks