CMS Made Simple Forums

I have an upcoming job creating a website for a plant nursery business, and I'm wondering if CMSMS is up to the task of managing the site's contents.

Most of the site will be plant records and each plant record will be "tagged" with a range of attributes and requirements. For example, a plant record might be tagged: frost tolerant, dry soil, bird attracting. A key website feature will be a search box that allows visitors to find plants with specific combinations of attributes/requirements. E.g. search for plants that need "partial sun" AND "moist soil". See this competitor website: http://www.oratianatives.co.nz

I thought perhaps the CGblog, Cataloger or Products modules might be useful in creating the plant records if they can tag articles with multiple categories, but would they support powerful searching to find combinations of categories? Has anyone developed a site with CMSMS that has this sort of functionality? Any advice is appreciated.

It sounds like you can use Products to manage the plants, and have categories for the different attributes, as you can assign multiple categories to your objects.

The search sounds a bit tricky.. You can create a form (maybe in a GCB with WYSIWYG turned off) with checkboxes for the different attributes, and when they click 'Submit', it POSTs the data to the results page. The results page has a UDT, which reads the POSTed checkbox data and builds a smarty variable called $categories containing the list of categories, comma separated... Under the UDT would be {Products category=$categories}, which would show the summaries of all the products that the user selected.

Not ridiculously difficult, but will take some time to figure out. There might be an easier way.

You can make the selection form be a Products summary template and have the checkboxes be dynamically created by the list of categories, so that when your client adds a category, it will automatically show up on the form.

Very clever how the competitor's site used JavaScript to toggle the different attribute images (Full Sun, etc) and converted it to the values in hidden fields for those attributes to be POSTed. Looks a lot better than checkboxes.

Thanks for your replies, Wishbone.

The Products module looks like a great starting point. The built-in search action of the module seems to be quite powerful and it would be good to use that without having to create my own UDT, which would likely be beyond my skills. There are a couple of questions I have about the Products search action, but I'll ask those in a separate topic over in the Modules/Add-Ons forum.

Thanks again.