I’m using the Spawn New Window Action in a site I’m building that has hundreds of products and they all need a thumbnail and a larger image, hence the excellent SNW Action. Trouble is with an ever increasing number of pop-up pages I have to scroll through a huge list of created pages to create the link.
The pop-up pages for each group of products are in individual FWP5 folders and even though I collapse these, the Action doesn’t see this so the list is huge and getter huger. So I’m wondering if there’s a better way; Paul Dunning says obviously the Action displays the page information FWP provides, so can FWP be made to pass on more accurate information?
I hate to tell you this at this stage, but if you have hundreds of
pages, you will have to scroll as you do. You could try putting
things in folders, to try to narrow it down a bit, but really that’s
a teacup in the ocean. When you get into hundreds of pages –
particularly hundreds of project pages (which probably are very
similar except for the product depicted) you are firmly into the
territory of a CMS. There are lots of these, and lots of ways to
integrate them with Freeway.
Walter
On Mar 3, 2008, at 4:49 AM, Kryten wrote:
I’m using the Spawn New Window Action in a site I’m building that
has hundreds of products and they all need a thumbnail and a larger
image, hence the excellent SNW Action. Trouble is with an ever
increasing number of pop-up pages I have to scroll through a huge
list of created pages to create the link.
The pop-up pages for each group of products are in individual FWP5
folders and even though I collapse these, the Action doesn’t see
this so the list is huge and getter huger. So I’m wondering if
there’s a better way; Paul Dunning says obviously the Action
displays the page information FWP provides, so can FWP be made to
pass on more accurate information?
Cheers Walt. Well, this is a WebYep site and the client is doing the text only at the moment - so I’ll guess I’ll just keep scrolling. But I’ll ask him and see if he wants to save some money.
I would imagine from your perspective it would make way more sense to
have one product page, and one detail page and one order page for the
entire site, then spin that out to hundreds of products in WebYep.
Even if the client doesn’t want to maintain it, you could, and save
yourself tons of heartache. Many of the projects I work on have
‘count on fingers’ number of actual pages in the Freeway document,
but hundreds or thousands of published pages in the site. It’s an
economy of scale thing. And it also leads to fewer mistakes.
Walter
On Mar 3, 2008, at 8:52 AM, Kryten wrote:
Cheers Walt. Well, this is a WebYep site and the client is doing
the text only at the moment - so I’ll guess I’ll just keep
scrolling. But I’ll ask him and see if he wants to save some money.
Walter. Please excuse my stupidity, but can you just explain how using WebYep make sthe job so much easier. Can’t quite get my head round that. Do you mean using the Menu system?
I mean creating a single instance of each type of catalog page, and
then fill those templates in from the database.
In Freeway, you just design a single example of each type of page,
wire the template up with fields for everything specific to a
particular product, say Category, Photo, Name, Description, Price,
Shipping, Weight, Dimensions. Then you can create 20 or 200 “pages”
by entering data in the database and uploading properly named photos.
Then when you want to refer to those from a list view, you create a
single page with a dynamic list view on it. I imagine Max’s WebYep
Action allows you to draw a widget that creates a sortable list of
pages in a single category. I haven’t used WebYep myself, but I have
used countless other CMS tools, and that’s the basic idea.
Walter
On Mar 3, 2008, at 9:10 AM, Kryten wrote:
Walter. Please excuse my stupidity, but can you just explain how
using WebYep make sthe job so much easier. Can’t quite get my head
round that. Do you mean using the Menu system?
Ah I see. No database I’m afraid. I’ve never used one and don’t know anything about them or how to implement/integrate them unfortunately; time to learn I think.
Thanks Walter.
btw, our terrier is a Parson Russell, like a Jack Russell but with longer legs - very fast like yours! Just had pups too.
Ah, that’s lovely. Rosie is nearly two years old – still a puppy in
many respects. And very very fast. We take her to the dog park to
race with the greyhounds. The other thing she loves to do is jump up
against the side of the garage. She just floats up there, plants all
four paws on the wall, and then floats back to earth. I’ll have to
post some video of it some day. Her bottom is plainly above the gate
as she is doing this, but she has never (knock wood) jumped over the
fence.
Walter
On Mar 3, 2008, at 9:35 AM, Kryten wrote:
btw, our terrier is a Parson Russell, like a Jack Russell but with
longer legs - very fast like yours! Just had pups too.
If you’re using WebYep, this has its own thumbnail/Pop up window as one of the settings for photos.
One problem with WebYeb is the data is being drawn from individual text files. So its questionable whether having hundreds of products, WebYep is the correct tool for this job. A proper database would be more efficient.
Another low cost option to use (apart from your time setting up and skinning out) is a full shopping cart like OSCommerce (Free) This has all the functions to catalogue and order hundreds or thousands of products, and maintains clients and orders - and the client can edit it. Create your front end Freeway site, and link it to the catalogue/shop. Just a thought.
On 3 Mar 2008, at 09:49, Kryten wrote:
I’m using the Spawn New Window Action in a site I’m building that has hundreds of products and they all need a thumbnail and a larger image, hence the excellent SNW Action. Trouble is with an ever increasing number of pop-up pages I have to scroll through a huge list of created pages to create the link.
David Owen
Freeway Friendly Web hosting and Domains ::
Just seen this and the pop up page/thumbnail can be made from within webyep
Waltd is right I too would first try to break down the site into a few sections and then place a WebYep menu system on those pages and then get webyep to generate the pages from there on in including links on the webyep images.
Doing it this way you would only probably have to build a few page in freeway
Max - excellent advice. At the moment all the pop-ups have the same ‘corporate’ look as the main site in terms of masthead & logo etc. Is this an option using Webyep?
no, its just a larger version of the photo uploaded by the client. And if the client is not consistent with photo sizes and proportions, the photo will display the pop-up at different sizes.
Unless Max knows otherwise?
David
On 4 Mar 2008, at 10:17, Kryten wrote:
Max - excellent advice. At the moment all the pop-ups have the same ‘corporate’ look as the main site in terms of masthead & logo etc. Is this an option using Webyep?
David Owen
Freeway Friendly Web hosting and Domains ::
Sorry for coming back late on this but rush jobs need to get done.
Maximum menu items… well the newest version 1.2.2 pre6 and on are able to use lists and I have played around using sub lists within the main menu.
So for example… you will be able to have a menu which you then can click on an item in that menu which will then inturn expand that section to see more items within it… how far this can go… well I don’t really know as I have never got that massive, but if you could break up the items into say 6 main pages even if they look the same then each of those sections would have webyep menu with 30 odd menu links thats if if you needed over 200 pages.
As far as performance hit… Again I am not sure as I have never noticed any difference with a site that has a huge amount of WebYep items on it from a site that just has a few… but at some point there must be a speed difference.
Masthead & logo etc. I think so… what would happen is the pop up is in fact a page with a webyep image area on it and this is what the thumbnail is linked to.
Probably the best thing for me to do is just make a page up with a menu, dummy text, and a pop up window to see if it works or if I am talking a load of old rubbish. :o)
When I get home tonight I will quickly whack something together
Thanks all so much for your input. It might help if you take a look < http://nu-lookbathrooms.co.uk/ > and go to Products → Bathroom suites ( http://nu-lookbathrooms.co.uk/bathroomsuites1.php I think)and you’ll see what I’m doing. Just for the record this is the client’s logo/font/colour scheme etc…you’ll get the point.
For example just 2 product sections have 120 pop-ups and I haven’t even started the other products yet.
ok this is 1 example on how to populate a site using just a few pages… well 1 main and three pop up pages you can see screen shots here and you can also download the example:
As you can see from the screen shots I have created a WY menu and next to that is a DIV
This DIV conatins three inline DIV’s with a margin applied to them. These DIV’s have in turn two webyep items inside of them, an WebYep image and a Webyep long-text.
each WebYep image is linked to either pop-up window 1,2 or 3
Then this row of items starts with a WebYep loop and ends with a webyep loop end
Finally the normal WebYep lock and WebYep init page code has been added.
Browser
Once you view the site on a server you will be able to create as many pages as you like. In my example I have created 13 but it could have been 30. Then I created three loops, nine items in total per page, but again it could be more. So after all this, in my example I have created 13 pages with 9 items on each page with 9 descriptions and with pop windows for each item a total of 117 items with 117 pop-ups
The only real draw back is that you dont have much control over the popup window, because this is all handled by webyep . To create the pop-up window size I had to apply the size to the actual window it’s self rather than to the link which fires the the pop-up. But if its quantity you need then this is the way to do it.
If you didnt need the pop-up image to sit on it’s own page then you would use thumbnail in the image action window and not link the images to any pop-up windows as this would be handled by webyep.
still all in all very little work for a humongous amount of pages plus the freeway artwork is tiny.
As an update to the example given above. I have been speaking to Johannes at OBD and the good news is it now possible to launch the pop-up page with no scroll bars and no address etc. I need to do a small amendment to the action, But I have tested it and it works a treat… YIPPPEEEE… :o)
I even appled the mootools action to the contents of the pop-up faded up and that worked perfectly as well so when I am done I will post the instructions