Object Oriented Article Manager

[wetzel]

Although I have only been working with OS Commerce a few months, I think that Article Manager is one of the best contributions. Really excellent.

 

I am going to be trying to stretch its capabilities over the next few weeks to serve some individual needs, and I want to do it in a way that adheres to OS Commerce principles so that others may benefit.

 

I am going to aim to allow different sets of articles to appear in different boxes in the left or right column. Object oriented programming wouldn't be necessary. Using a function based approach initiated by the scripts from either the left or right columns, a query of a new 'article_group' table in the database etc. could gather the particular 'info_box_contents' for the particular set of articles. In that case, each set wouldn't be separately 'configured'. It would just be a more flexible presentation layer.

 

To make such a system run completely from Admin would require placing a half-dozen or so dormant articles boxes in left_column.php and right_column.php which would be activated by the configuration of a new article group.

 

Ultimately, I think it would be a great thing to rebuild Article Manager from the ground up using object oriented techniques, so that Admin could be used to instantiate separate Article Manager objects. That would be a heck of an application. My brain hurts thinking about it.

 

I know I can bull-doze through over the next week to get this to work for me in a patchwork way, but I would like to create something useful to this group, which has saved me enormous time and effort already.

 

Judging from some of the latest messages, though, Article Manager is on the edge of being hard to troubleshoot already. It looks like some of the veterans of the thread have decided not to support the newcomers because of how hard it is to problem solve. What I don't want to do is overcomplicate it.

 

Please let me know wht you guys think.

[Guest]

What?

 

I'm fuzzy about your intentions. What exactly are you trying to accomplish?

 

Bobby