Filter Categories by Manufacturer

By | April 2, 2012

Every website/makeover I build, I try to do something that I have never seen done before on a osCommerce site. For the latest build I put together a new box module that allows the shopper to drill down the category by manufacturer.

If that sounds familiar, it is because it already exists in osCommerce, as a dropdown in the category pages;

What I did was rip the functionality out of the index page, and put it into a box module (and gave it a bit better style). I also tried to make it more intuitive by adding text reminding shoppers that they have set a “filter”;

And here is a video of it in action;

Let me know what you think. Happy to hear any ideas for making it better.

8 thoughts on “Filter Categories by Manufacturer

  1. Gary Post author

    Hi Harald. That’s a great idea, I’ll look at making the code for that.

  2. Paul

    Like it Gary, and it’s something I find very useful.

    If we didn’t have 20,000 products on the stationery site I would like to do that but with multiple attributes, so for example we might have a product which is Paper > A4 > 80GSM > White so the filter would ideally do more than one attribute, much like the one in Magento. I assume in that case you would just create additional attributes/fields in each product and say whether it is included in the filter?

    Other uses for us would be our envelope and file finders.

  3. Gary Post author

    Hi mate – this one is only manufacturers, as that is the only filter available in standard osc. I think there is a “product specifications” addon written by kymation (Jim) which I have not tried but I think would come close to what you need…

    I have actually (as far as I recall) never tried that addon, so I’ll try to find time in the next couple of days to test it out.

  4. Gary Post author

    There is also another called “product extra fields” – this one adds extra inputs in the product adding/editing page in admin. It should then be possible to filter on those. That might work more straightforward than the previous one I mentioned.

    I used the product extra fields in a post previously.

  5. barrt

    hi
    anywhere we can download this contribution you made? i need something like this.

    im just returning to oscommerce after 4 years having suffered from having to hack away so much of the core code with contributions on the previous versions.

    please share
    thanks

  6. Gary Post author

    As it is, Harald has asked me to share this for inclusion in the next 2.x series of osc. But it is attitudes like your other comment (gimme gimme gimme) that make me disinclined to share anything.

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