oppinion on admin approach on ecommerce website
Hi, I am trying to design a good approach for my new ecommerce website.
(1) Currently I have a supplier uploading product images via FTP to the server, they are also including a .CSV which I intend to set up a CRON job so it adds the data to a table on the database. With this I have setup on the backend to allow my client to select from these records and create a product. With this approach I am not storing any product filenames directly in the products table in the database. The filenames of the product images consist of the product SKU (which is stored in the product table - I could also allow the client to manually upload a product image if required. This approach does mean that I cannot use any WebAssist server behaviors to do any image manipulation such as image resize. But can use the WebAssist server behavior to cache a resized image on the server. Any thoughts on this approach. Am I missing any potential problems that could arise?
(2) Relating to the above, I may have discovered a bug, In the backend part of the website, when I initially look at the page displaying all the newly uploaded images (there are over 1000). Using the pagination last page button, The very last record that was showing was a PHP error relating to the WebAssist Image Resizer server behavior. I need to reproduce this, but is there a limit on what the server behavior can do since it is caching a lot of images?
(3) Im trying to plan ahead and figure out a good way to allow my client to assign products to categories. basically I have 3 tables (category, product and a linking table which stores the ID values of both the category and product records). My questions are; (a) Should I design it so that when the client goes to the category section in the admin, they can click a link beside each category record which takes them to a page where they can chose a product to assign...or (b) when the client goes to the product section in the admin, they can click a link besides each product record which takes them to a page where they can chose a category to assign? (c) Do I do both approaches from questions A and B? (d) I was thinking on the actual product update page I could create a dropdown where client can chose a category to assign, when they have chosen one, I can use javascript to display another dropdown where client can chose another category to assign and so on) - This could be a different form submit on the page). is there an approach I haven't thought of?
Chris
