CODEWITHSUNDEEP
magentocontent-management-system
Nick_de_K
Nick_de_K

Reputation: 63

Magento content management; prevent a mess

So, I started on a new project this week and of course I'm thinking about the problems I'm going to find during the whole development process. We are going to make a shop that has a pretty good design, pretty excited to work on this. However, the design uses a lot of content that can't be placed in the normal functions of magento. For example there is a catalog page that has a lot of content blocks with secondary information like unique selling points or a bit of story telling. This can and will be different for different categories. We are talking about a lot of small content blocks, not something you can cram into the category description field ;)

Until now I mostly used static blocks to make this content and show them on the pages, maybe even use xpath to extract the information I need from the blocks to prevent the end-user from destroying the design by using the WYSIWYG editor. However, I don't think this will be a good solution now because there will simply be to much static blocks to create and use without loosing the overview of everything, plus I doubt xpath is really good performance wise (something like getting a screw in with a hammer).

I was thinking about making a module or using a module that makes it possible to add attributes and use attribute sets in combination with static blocks. With that you can make your own fields and groups for certain pages and make it easy for the end-user to edit information on their webshop. However, making this myself (does sound like a lot of fun) will take to much time, and I can't really find a module that does something like this.

How do you guys solve these problems when creating a new webshop? Any tips?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 63

Answers (2)

Nick_de_K
Nick_de_K

Reputation: 63

I ended up using a combination of zokibtmkd answer and adding fields to the default static blocks (a image upload function and a link field). The combination of these two solutions gave me enough to work with in the design without messing up the admin or the templates.

Upvotes: 0

zokibtmkd
zokibtmkd

Reputation: 2183

I suppose you will be using your own theme with own template for the category page, here you will setup all the HTML that you don't want the admin to mess up with the WYSIWYG editor and let them change only certain parts of the page. For the admin to be able to edit these, you will need to add new attributes to the category entity. For example if the admin should add text for a certain box, add text type of attribute, if the admin wants to add HTML create WYSIWYG editor type of attribute and so on. Then in your template you will check if the category has any of these attributes and they have non-empty values then print them.

For example:

<?php if ($category->getCustomTextAttribute() != ''): ?> <div id="your-div"> <?php echo $category->getCustomTextAttribute(); ?> </div> <?php endif; ?> <?php if ($category->getPromotionHtml() != ''): ?> <div id="promotion-div"> <?php echo $category->getPromotionHtml(); ?> </div> <?php endif; ?> This goes the same for the product pages with the difference that for products you can create the attributes via the admin and then print them on the product page template, otherwise for Categories you need to write a module that does this, if you want me I can provide you with an example of module for creating Category attributes.

Upvotes: 1

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