[Pro] Managing a Large Site with Hundreds of Items

Freeway
1

I’m new to Freeway and to this board/list.

I bought Freeway to do a specific task: manage my flag sales website, where I have hundreds of items to display.

Clearly, I’m not up to speed on this program yet, but test-drove it and it seems to have most, if not all of what I need.

I used Adobe GoLive for years, but with upgrading to Lion found it too expensive to upgrade or buy the whole CS suite all over again. I have been using Mac computers since 1986 and used to teach classes, but mostly what we old fogies called Desktop Publishing.

It looks like I should rebuild my whole site from scratch, or perhaps carry the tables over that already have all the forms info in them.

However I have been told that it might be better in the long run to have all my data in a database, that is, all the flags/items for sale each with their own entry.

I don’t know how to do this at all. I also don’t have a real shopping cart system in there, either. My hosting services have Zen cart and a couple others, but with the huge number of items I have, it’s a daunting task.

I’m flailing around here trying to figure out where to start? I’m sure some of you might have some useful ideas. If I had $$ right now I’d hire someone to do it for me, but I need to be able to maintain the thing myself.

Thanks for your help.

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

2

Hi Jean,

welcome to FWT. Well - to me a complicate and not easy to recommend topic cause it smells a 100% e-commerce.

The point on e-com is as you already figured out the choice of the engine behind. To me and Freeway related (and with my low-level experience) there are basically two ways going down the road.

  1. Mal’s ecom http://www.mals-e.com/

With Mal’s you set your entire shop system within freeway (artwork, appearance) and Mal’s “just” handles the checkout process. This is to me personal OK as long as the number of items are in an acceptable range. So here, no database structure (SQL) would be necessary, but a lot of personal intention and work, but all data would be handled within your own control.

  1. Ecwid Shopping Cart http://www.ecwid.com/

This is a personal favorite of mine cause it is easy and seamless to integrate into a Freeway surrounding. The basic idea here is, that you have the possibility to manage the product-stuff, payments, shipping work in a separate “Back-End”, but the shop itself is running in your page using a few lines of code. The caveat here is, that all your stuff is hosted on external servers. This is nothing making me personal fear but it needs to be said. How to integrate it in FW I did once a small screencast that can be found at:

http://kimmich-dm.de/screencasts/screen1-ecwid.php

And now the monoliths called ZEN, Open Cart or whatever. Those are basically systems that live their own life. Neither in installing, filling, design and handling any Visual Based App could really help you here. The advantage of systems like these is, that you host all your stuff within your own HOST services. But the design or seamless integration into a running (or to built up environment) is open sproken “expert mode” with a lot of HTML and CSS fiddling. An example of OpenCart I once set up on:

http://test.q-ring.de/shop6%20/index.php which refers to a Freeway page http://test.q-ring.de/index.php (from the design view). This had been hard work and often far beyond my personal knowledge as a visual designer.

So sometimes I as well tend to recommend to have a quick view into the “HOSTING Services” solutions like 1&1 or others offers. They are usually not to change from their templates but are outermost solid and straight forwarded.

Please note that these are my personal points of view and I’m pretty sure that there are much more to add.

Cheers

Thomas

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

3

Completely off the Freeway track, there is Shopify, which is a gorgeous, themeable and fully self-contained commerce platform. You choose a template (or have a geek code one from your example) and you install your products in their database. The finished product is either hosted under the shopify domain or your own, and has all of the commerce issues taken care of for you.

Walter

On Jun 5, 2012, at 4:28 AM, Thomas Kimmich wrote:

Hi Jean,

welcome to FWT. Well - to me a complicate and not easy to recommend topic cause it smells a 100% e-commerce.

The point on e-com is as you already figured out the choice of the engine behind. To me and Freeway related (and with my low-level experience) there are basically two ways going down the road.

  1. Mal’s ecom http://www.mals-e.com/

With Mal’s you set your entire shop system within freeway (artwork, appearance) and Mal’s “just” handles the checkout process. This is to me personal OK as long as the number of items are in an acceptable range. So here, no database structure (SQL) would be necessary, but a lot of personal intention and work, but all data would be handled within your own control.

  1. Ecwid Shopping Cart http://www.ecwid.com/

This is a personal favorite of mine cause it is easy and seamless to integrate into a Freeway surrounding. The basic idea here is, that you have the possibility to manage the product-stuff, payments, shipping work in a separate “Back-End”, but the shop itself is running in your page using a few lines of code. The caveat here is, that all your stuff is hosted on external servers. This is nothing making me personal fear but it needs to be said. How to integrate it in FW I did once a small screencast that can be found at:

http://kimmich-dm.de/screencasts/screen1-ecwid.php

And now the monoliths called ZEN, Open Cart or whatever. Those are basically systems that live their own life. Neither in installing, filling, design and handling any Visual Based App could really help you here. The advantage of systems like these is, that you host all your stuff within your own HOST services. But the design or seamless integration into a running (or to built up environment) is open sproken “expert mode” with a lot of HTML and CSS fiddling. An example of OpenCart I once set up on:

http://test.q-ring.de/shop6%20/index.php which refers to a Freeway page http://test.q-ring.de/index.php (from the design view). This had been hard work and often far beyond my personal knowledge as a visual designer.

So sometimes I as well tend to recommend to have a quick view into the “HOSTING Services” solutions like 1&1 or others offers. They are usually not to change from their templates but are outermost solid and straight forwarded.

Please note that these are my personal points of view and I’m pretty sure that there are much more to add.

Cheers

Thomas

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

4

On 5 Jun 2012, 8:28 am, Thomas Kimmich wrote:

Hi Jean,

welcome to FWT. Well - to me a complicate and not easy to recommend topic cause it smells a 100% e-commerce.

Thank you for the suggestions. But I’m curious about this remark: did I post in the wrong section?

I have good hosting and pay for SSL already, looks like I’m going to have to do a lot of research to find the easiest way to revamp my site.

Which is of course why I posted.

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

5

You’re in the right place Jean, I think Thomas is just saying that how you
want to use Freeway Pro is generally known as e-commerce - the online
buying and selling of things - and is not considered easy, even using
Freeway Pro.

–
Ernie Simpson

On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 1:07 PM, Jean McDermott email@hiddenwrote:

On 5 Jun 2012, 8:28 am, Thomas Kimmich wrote:

Hi Jean,

welcome to FWT. Well - to me a complicate and not easy to recommend
topic cause it smells a 100% e-commerce.

Thank you for the suggestions. But I’m curious about this remark: did I
post in the wrong section?

I have good hosting and pay for SSL already, looks like I’m going to have
to do a lot of research to find the easiest way to revamp my site.

Which is of course why I posted.

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

6

Can we have a look at your existing site Jean - that may help us offer more carefully considered advice.

David

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

7

Jean,
I would encourage you to look at something like www.weebly.com. We have used for clients with CMS requirements. I’ve never done an ecommerce site with them, but they have drag and drop ecommerce features. You can start for free (includes 2 sites-great for making a back up or testing features). Once you poke around, you can see how to customize the CSS. Their new templates are pretty nice. Lots of customization available. Good luck! Let us know which way you go. PS-I am a longtime Freeway pro user.
Jan

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

8

You can see it at http://www.fairbanksflags.com

I could conceivably use the Paypal buttons as a shopping cart, put one for each item. It may be what I end up doing. PayPal does have options for such things.

I’m embarrassed because the site is not well-designed right now!

Thanks to Jan for another suggestion.

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

9

Hi Jean,

Personally, If I were you, I would look at something like Opencart or similar.

Here’s my reasoning; by the time it would have taken to transfer all the flags across into the new freeway site, including all the Paypal ‘buy now’ buttons etc. All your shop data could be punched into the back-end of, say, Opencart.

This could then be linked up to Paypal for the payments etc.

The other advantage of using Opencart would be the vast amount of plugins, themes, modules…

Just my 2c on the matter…

Seb

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

10

Hi Jean
looking at the link you posted then I would say this isn’t actuality a very big site/database job.
You could do it in a number of ways but if you actually wanted to be able to design the site in Freeway and design shopping cart page (not just use a prebuilt theme) then from what I can see this is probably a three page freeway site using a combination of Freeway, and a couple of actions like Mals-e and cms of your choice, although I would plug webyep for this one as I know it could tackle this job easily, but you arnt restricted to webyep or Mals-e I know other people on this forum prefer other cms’s / shopping carts and there are quite a few out there to use so it really is a personal preferences based on the job requirement.
Anyway from what I can see the site can be built using just 3 freeway pages

  1. The home page
  2. The generic products page
  3. and generic shopping cart page

If you were to use a combination of Freeway, a CMS which can generate pages from the master generic products page, plus a shopping cart system like Mals-e that can use the cms, then from those three pages you could generate 1000’s of products on 100’s of pagers with individual pricing and all from those three pages.
Technically you would not need to open freeway to add more products or categories as it could all be done from a browser.

I hope that helps guide you but if not let me know and I could always slap something together showing what I mean.

all the best Max

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

11

Max,

What is CMS?

What you are describing sounds like what I was thinking of originally as a way to add all the product (there are many more that can be added, as well, everyone is always asking for THEIR flag in various products) without having to create new pages in Freeway.

Seb,

I will check out OpenCart, thanks!

Jean

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

12

What is CMS?

Here’s a very simple overview to get you started http://www.xiiro.com/cms.php.

Todd

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options