Pagination with dynamic records - sorting

Imagine a site with 1,000 pages, with 20 pics on each page. Sorting is done by rating, and since site is very popular, ratings for pics are changed very frequently (rating is based on number of votes). One pic might have rating 5.6, and 5 mins later 5.9 and so on.
There is a problem when visitor is browsing site - on some pages he'll see pics he alredy saw on one of previous pages (because in meantine rating is changed for some pics).
I don't know what is the proper solution for this. Do I need to make changes in script so site will remember order of ALL pics when user start browsing? Also, new pics are added every minute or two, so they needs to be visible too.
What is the best approach for this?
Thanks

Think about how the ratings will change.. if it really is so popular then the ratings will not change so much unless the image is new. For new images a rating could change considerably but the divergence will decrease upon each rating. You may just want to put something saying the image is 'hot' or 'trending' or something similar.

Related

How do I override the base price against Custom option Pricing?

Hi this was a question from magento forum on their site.. However I am looking for the same thing for a while, could any answer this ?
*I need the exact area in which Magento adds Base price and Custom option price *
I have been looking across these forums so many apologies if this is a
duplicate, but I am having a lot of trouble with the custom option
pricing on front-end not being absolute, but adding itself onto the
base price of the product.
I have been looking at a few modules, which I am happy to purchase, if
easy to implement, but there are quite a few that are going around.
Attached are some images if anyone has a solution.
The base price on the product (is a product with many different custom
options, could be size options also) is £7.32, which is fine as the
page states ‘From £7.32’
However, there are a few options selectable, which rather than show
(+) and ultimately add to the base price, should show the actual price
and not onto of the base price.
So Rhynogrip 70 x 198 price is actually £48.96, however when selected
it adds this to the £7.32, rather than replace it. The attached all
show this.
If anyone could help that would be great!
Thanks in advance.
I recommend you set the price of Rhinogrip 70x198 to 48.96 - 7.32 because that is what MAgento expects.

Magento custom browse catalogue workflow

I'm evaluating Magento for a particular client of mine. They want to enforce a particular workflow for browsing the catalogue. They're a travel company which puts together custom holiday packages and want to make sure users enter things like the number of adults / children before selecting accommodation (as number of people will affect available accommodation and pricing).
Note that accommodation is just an example, there are several other different components to a holiday package. And they've given me a 7 step (mostly) linear workflow they want users to follow before we get to anything which might resemble a checkout process (and even then their concept of "checkout" is quite different to Magento's).
I'm thinking of storing accommodation (and each of the other package components) in separate product categories. Then I can restrict what users can see as they browse the catalogue based on what they've already added to their shopping cart.
My research indicates that Magento doesn't really do this kind of thing out of the box. Am I mistaken? Are there add-ons which would support this kind of thing?
If I was to go down this road, would I be redesigning (or indeed, replacing) a large chunk of Magento's catalogue browsing functionality?
Well there are several approaches that you can take to implement something like this; but all require that you do custom development work.
You could define your packages as simple products with attributes for each of the specific package options and use that to filter each package from the others, now you would need to create a new module that adds a route on the frontend that is going to be your multistep form that will get all the information once you have all the information you can get a collection of all the products(packages) that match those attributes.
Now the deal there is if that price changes depending on the options selected if that's the case then you might need configurable products or something custom to change the price of each package.
It's really hard to say without real specifications of what your client needs, but if the question is if it's possible with Magento then the answer is yes it all depends on your level of skill :)
Kind Regards
So I ended up going with Magento as a product base and extending it using some custom code (been a while since I've developed in a LAMP environment!)
I created a static block which is used as the root of the workflow. There are 8 steps in the workflow which get listed in an ordered list. Each item has two custom Magento widgets next to it, which are a) a little tick image displayed when you've completed the workflow stage and b) a link which displays when you're up to that stage, clicking the link takes you to an appropriate catalog page (eg: choose accommodation, hire car, confirm shopping cart, etc).
I disabled the normal top catalog navigation to encourage users to keep within the workflow. That is, the mouse over to see more catalog detail of the "holiday planner" is disabled (although you can just navigate to the correct urls if you know them, or are smart enough to use the SEO link at the bottom of the page!).
Everything in your holiday is added as cart products (which has the positive side effect of Magento will remember your holiday if you get part way through it).
There is a big state machine in a helper class to determine what stage of the workflow you're up to. This checks your cart to see if products with particular sku's or from a particular attribute set are added.
I also overrode many URLs and redirects (eg: after you add a product) to send the user back to the root holiday planner page. This added to the workflow as almost every action you did or product you add bounces you back to that workflow page (which always tells you what the next step is).

Magento: Adding product-specific audio/video samples to the product page

We've got a site where the customer sells physical, printed sheet music. They also have sample audio recordings of what the various compositions sound like, and they'd like to add these recordings to the product pages themselves. Among other things, the purpose of the recordings is to let a shopper play a recording of the composition so they know what they're buying.
The only way I can see to do this, without creating custom fields that we need to manually manage, is to create all the products as "Downloadable Products", and attaching the samples. The problem with doing a downloadable product, however, is that it actually has to have a downloadable component - my customer is not interested in selling, for example, PDFs of the sheet music. In our digital age you might think this silly, but they've already looked into doing this, and the end result is that sheet music is a little different than say, a book. Layout and formatting issues prevent sheet music from being a great candidate for digital distribution right now, since precise layout of the scales and notes is critical - i.e. the data is much more complex than text.
Any suggestions on how to pull this off? Are there extensions available that do this? I'd imagine an online store that sells physical CDs or vinyl wanting to have audio samples next to their products for the same reason.
Found a much simpler solution, which I didn't realize existed:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/32647/
Basically, the "Description" and "Short Description" fields on a product accept raw HTML, including <script> tags, which allow you to easily embed, for example, a Flash-based audio/video player, or even a YouTube video via an <embed> tag.
Tim Reynolds also pointed out that, if you use the WYSIWYG editor, these tags may get automatically filtered out, so watch out for that.
I think adapt Mage_Downloadable is not the best way. Once that customer need to order (without cost) the downloadable product to gain access to download, maybe useless.
I don't mind that add a file (or a link to a public) to an attribute is hard, have to be more easy than change downloadable products to work in this way.
I think you need a simplest way of this extension: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/magemechanics/extension/3027/product-file-upload. I'm right?

Using one stock for multiple items in Magento

Ok so what I want is to have multiple simple products draw from the same stock.
Scenario
I have a sinle nail file (Stock:500)
I have a box of nail files (50/box)
I want it so that if someone buys a box then it deducts from the 500 stock of the singles. Essentially what we do is if someone buys a box, then we ship them 50 of the single files in a box.
Any easy way to do this?
This isn't a native function of Magento, so there a few approaches you can take to emulate it:
Use an external stock management package to keep track of stock and modify Magento to use that. This will require more backend modification.
Attempt to fool Magento by using product bundles in clever ways. This will require more frontend modification
Develop or find a Bill of Materials plugin for Magento. I didn't see anything after a short search, so you may have to build it. Have that module check the constituent materials for a product before allowing it to be added to the cart.
Hope that helps!
Thanks,
Joe
Consider:
Create a template for the products that you wish to order this way. This template need only be the files you need to modify, by default it will find the missing files from your default theme;
In the template you can place some PHP to write out some extra javascript, of the prototype variety;
This frontend code hides the real quantity box, with prototype 'hide' for the relevant css id to make it a hidden form field;
The code shows its own quantity box, also an extra field for how many of the fifty packs are required;
An onchange event on these boxes gets the values of the boxes, does the required multiplication and addition, then updates the hidden 'real' quantity box with (boxes*50)+singles;
On submit the customer sees in the cart the total quantity of the product ordered - this will be total units, not broken down 'per box'. If this is a problem, you can put some words to explain that or modify your main template to handle this and present to the customer the boxes+singles breakdown;
Set your products to use the 'new theme' that has your template update code.
Test, test, test!
As mentioned by Joseph this cannot be done out of the box. The above workaround is only partial, however, so long as you make it clear to customers that they are buying 500 units instead of 500 boxes then you should have a reasonable solution.

Magento add rate options to products

i wanna add the option to vote for a product or give a rating, you know, the 5 stars, the user pick an amount, i don't know if i can do that in the backend, untill now, no result, i need someone to guide me with this, maybe i need a new module, or maybe just configure the backend and wow, its done.
thanks
Refer to this forum post. Basically, you need to go to admin Catalog>Reviews and Ratings>Manage Ratings to set up the options for Ratings, and then assign them to your store view. The default templates should then show the Ratings html widgets.

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