Magento

I am hoping to use Magento to replace a heavily customized osCommerce installation for a book publisher. We have renamed the Manufacturer to Author and Model to ISBN. We also added extra code here and there to preserve that illusion. Due to the nature of osCommerce code, it is very hard to carry those changes from one version to the next.

Does Magento offer a less-hackish way to do a similar thing? Something I could do as a separate module, translation file, etc. that I would be able to preserve as I keep upgrading the default Magento installation? Is such extensibility designed into the system or at least planned for the future?

In the meantime, would it at least be possible to manage manufacturers? I do not see any such option in the admin interface (checked out the SVN version.)

Thank you very much.

Thank you for asking

Yes, the product attributes (properties, fields) feature is one of the strongest in Magento, by allowing the user fully customize records of different types of products in same database.

This screencast: http://www.magentocommerce.com/media/screencasts/creating-and-managing-attributes/view will show you how to manage the attributes.

Now, it depends how sophisticated your manufacturers logic is. If it is just one of the informational fields, they can be managed on the Attribute Options tab.
If you require more advanced logic, then custom module will can be written. it is my feeling that we’ll have generic module with most requested features for manufacturers management.

I might not be exactly clear on what you are asking but here is my answers anyway

We have renamed the Manufacturer to Author and Model to ISBN.
Currently for every product you can customize the information needed per product… ("everything is an Attribute”: You can choose them to be visible, search able etc… ) With that said you can set up a product with a Author, Manufacturer, and ISBN number, plus whatever other information you desire.

In the meantime, would it at least be possible to manage manufacturers? I do not see any such option in the admin interface (checked out the SVN version.)

what information do you need to manage manufactures?  I know you can set up a manufacturer attribute (which you can select to be a drop down) and list the manufacturers.

Oops. I looked at the list of attributes, but I did not realize Manufacturers are there already. Well, maybe in that case I can already do everything I need with this, since you can set the attribute to be a filter etc. Thanks!

i have managed to ad many manufacturers and laos have produced a drop down list of them hpwevr i have a problem....

i would like under each product to put a link of the name of the particular manufacturer that has designed this product and when i click on it i want a page to appear as follows:

manufacturers name: ( which is actually the only field i can add in magento administration)
manufacturers description:

and a manufactuirers image:

any idea of how this could beimplemented?

any helpo would be highly appreciated!!

Thank you very much!!!!

i have managed to ad many manufacturers and laos have produced a drop down list of them hpwevr i have a problem....

i would like under each product to put a link of the name of the particular manufacturer that has designed this product and when i click on it i want a page to appear as follows:

manufacturers name: ( which is actually the only field i can add in magento administration)
manufacturers description:

and a manufactuirers image:

any idea of how this could beimplemented?

any help would be highly appreciated!!

Thank you very much!!!!

There are a few things you can do without having lots of Magento expertise.

1) Create Manufacturer about pages in the cms and give them urls that arre of the form http://magentostore.com/acme

2) Create images in the /media/brands directory of the form acme.jpg

3) Edit your product page template to put your own code around ‘getManufacturer()’ so that an image is shown from the /media/brands/ directory by adding a prefix and ‘.jpg’ to pull up the image. Similarly the link can take you to the CMS page.

4) On your CMS pages you can add a link to show all products by copying the URL you get from the search facility for that manufacturer.

Hello,

You can also try the Shop By Brands mod.

This extension will help full you can check that i install that and it’s really cool!
http://free-magentoextensions.com/extensions/shop-by-manufacturers.html

We have updated our Shop By Brands Magento Extension for 1.6 and added new functionality to it as well. Now Compatible with 1.6 and will keep updating it as new versions are released.

http://www.fmeextensions.com/extensions/administration/shop-by-manufacturers.html

You can extend the manufacturers functionality quite a bit with this Custom Module.

If you have any questions feel free to contact us on the product questions tab.

regards,

Hi!

You can get great ‘shop by brand’ functionality with Improved Navigation Extension.
It allows to create brand pages(http://improved-navigation.amasty.com/amd.html). Also with it you can make lists of all brands in nice alphabetically ordered blocks, create the “featured brands” block and have nice short urls for brand pages.

Discover live demo here http://improved-navigation.amasty.com/
See the user guide here http://amasty.com/improved-navigation.html

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