WP Ecommerce Plugin

[billbenson]

Interesting. When I did a cms a number of years ago, I had a far more complicated way of doing it. I don't remember how. The post_parent is so simple. I never thought of it before.

Is it possible to have two parents? For example in a ecommerce site, you may want a product to appear under two or more parents as it may be used with both parent products?

[vangogh]

I don't believe you could have a post with two parents. You'd need to create two posts with the same content and give it two parents. Though you could always code your navigation in a way to make it look like the page was under two different pages.

[billbenson]

You could use some character as a field separator and put multiple parents in there. Two identical pages would be unnecessary dup content, but it appears that is the only way to do it in WP.

[vangogh]

You mean adding that directly to the database? I wouldn't think it's a good idea to go around altering the database, especially since an upgrade to WordPress could easily wreak havoc with your changes.

I'm not really sure why you'd want multiple parents on a page anyway. On my site I have one page that sits under two of my main categories of pages. It's under the design section and the seo section in the navigation. It only has the one parent though. In my case the parent is the design category. In the navigation under seo I just link to the page, but the URL will show it's still under the design category.

[billbenson]

No, I'm going back to when you suggested building a cms myself, not with wp. The only way I would modify wp is with additional tables, not altering tables. I'm just saying that would be one approach for multiple parents if I did a cms of my own. Could start getting complicated pretty quick though. Probably better to create a parent table at that point. Not something I'm going to do in the near future anyway. I'm just trying to get a good understanding of how wp works.

As to why? The wp is support for a shopping cart. With 2k products In some sites there could be quite a bit of this. Since the wp part of the site is support for the catalog, it would have the requirements. I can see a lot of products having multiple parents. There are plenty of work arounds. A link in the page text is probably easiest but hard to keep up to date.

In the case of the redo of my site, one of my real issues is good navigation is very difficult. Realistically a lot of products should be in sub and subsub categories. They could be very hard to find that way. Multiple parents would be very advantageous in making sure a visitor finds the product. That will spill over to the wp support stuff.

The solution I'm probably going to go with is to put the stuff I make the most from in the top level of the navigation. The other stuff, if its hard to find the other stuff so be it.

I've played around with the search function. Its in multiple places on the page. I feel like putting a box that says "Idiot, use the (&(&* search box". My customers won't use it. In part because they don't even know what they need is called in a lot of cases.

There isn't an easy solution and the manufacturer has a more difficult site to find products. I usually use a G site search to find something on the manufacturers site. I'm just trying to figure out the best way, hence my interest in how wp handles nav. Maybe I should just remove it and force visitors to use the search function.

[vangogh]

Oh I got it. Yeah, you'd probably want to go with a parents table in that case.

Instead of thinking parent/child you could use a different taxonomy. You could tag certain products so they could be listed across categories, but still keep each product in one category with one parent.

I guess you are looking for taxonomies here.