How does Cataloger Module Works?

[c1000mg]

Hi,

I was wondering if is anyone used Cataloger Module before with a large amount of Items, well I'm trying to make an online catalog  with about 5000 to 8000 products, and I have a list of about 200 categories and sub-Categories, do I have to make a page for every Category and Sub-Category and every product can I make a CVS or Excel file to import the data?? where can I read more about Cataloger???

Thank you all

[Duketown]

c1000mg,

Although I'm not using that many products with cataloger, I can give you some answers. You have allready seen that you have to make a page for every (sub)category and product. There is no way around this situation. There is currently no option to import data. For the text this would not be al to hard since it will be preparing information from the existing system to SQL that can be used in the database for CMSMS (think of this as restoring a backup of the contents table).

The available information can be located at: http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/User_Handbook/Admin_Panel/Extensions/Cataloger (which is the same as pressing the help button in the module).

If you have some php knowledge you migth first try to generate that many pages automatically by using coding that can be found in:
http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/topic,2180.msg11839.html#msg11839. Be careful, since it has been posted in early stages and the tables might have more columns and the logic behind the pages/content might request for more information with the more current versions of CMSMS.
[edit:]It is probably better to look at the original thread of this message, since it includes discussion on modern versions as well and how to use it: http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/topic,15369.msg76304.html#msg76304[/edit]


You don't mention the loading of the images? The loading is something that can be done easily with ftp, but connecting them to the correct content, might give some headaches.   :-\

Duketown

[sjg]

For automating the uploading of images, you can use the fact that Cataloger uses the upload/images/catalog_src directory.

Files are names [page-alias]_src_[image number].jpg

So, if your page alias were "my-page", and you had two images on the page, the files would be:

upload/images/catalog_src/my-page_src_1.jpg
upload/images/catalog_src/my-page_src_2.jpg

That being said, I doubt Cataloger is really the best choice for that big a catalog. Just finding the items to edit them will be difficult. It was originally written to be for things like Artists' portfolios and such.

Good luck,
___Samuel___