Products & Authors configuration / programming

[jmandala]

I would like to program a bookstore in KK. In order to do that I need to be able to associate products, often books, with authors. The product page would list all the authors, and have links to each author page. The author page would include a photo (optional) and a bio + other text, like tour schedule and so on. It would also include a reference back to all the available products display image, title, price, etc.

An example of what I would like to achieve has been built by the Soundstrue shop. And example is here:

Product Page: http://shop.soundstrue.com/shop.soundstrue.com/SelectProd.do?prodId=328&manufacturer=Sounds%20True&category=Tibetan&name=Pure%20Meditation


Author Page: http://shop.soundstrue.com/authors.soundstrue.com/chodronp/

I can imagine how I could enter the text and links to the author pages within the product text field. But I'm not clear on how I would be handle the author information. Specifically, does KK admin provide any admin for creating and managing author information? And is the best way to display the author information to simply custom code each author page, and include some sort of call back function to get a list of associated titles? Or is this a good candidate for the OpenCMS (or other CMS) integration?

Please let me know if this is not clear.

I look forward to your thoughts!

Joshua

[trevor]

I think that your author could become the KonaKart manufacturer ? In one of the custom manufacturer fields you could supply a key to look up extra author information such as the biography which wouldn't currently fit in the available manufacturer attributes.

[jmandala]

Interesting. Would this support multiple authors, which is a frequent occurence?

[trevor]

Not unless you created a manufacturer for the author combinations.

Another alternative could be to have the authors as categories. A product can have multiple categories. Also you can add tags to categories so for an author you could categorize the books using tags (i.e. romance, thriller, crime etc.)

[jmandala]

Interesting thoughts, though I'm not sure they would really solve the problem. Author combinations are many, and authors are many as well. Therefore neither categories nor manufacturer combinations really address our needs.

Is it safe to assume that this is something the could be solved with custom programming? I'm wondering if, for example:

1. a database table of author names and text were added
2. author ids were assigned to products as custom product fields
3. a new view was created to display authors when a specific id is given
4. each author page would do a lookup to find any products with the author id in the custom field and display it
5. the search could be enhanced so that searching by author name would find the product display
6. the product display would traverse the custom product field reference to be able to display the author information
7. I have another system that already manages the author-product assignement, so I would be populating KK's product using web services or direct pojo access

Does this sound like I'm on the right track?

[trevor]

I think that you'd want a many to many relationship between product and author; like we have between product and category. In this way you would use just one custom field in the product object.