advise on custom work

[subzerostudio]

Hi,

 

This may be a long post, but please bear with me!

 

I am doing some custom work for Clickgroove.

 

I wish to change the way people can browse the site, currently they can only view tracks. We want them to be able to choose whether to browse by tracks, or by releases. We also want them to be able to buy a release (a selection of tracks - e.g. an album) - at a discounted price using a single buy now button. Or to be able to still choose tracks singularly if they'd prefer.

 

Originally I thought about using the 'master products' contribution for that. However it isn't really an option in this case - firstly as half the work has already been done (if you look here you'll notice that we already have related products underneath (we've added a 'products_family' field to each product - which can easily be updated using easy populate). Secondly we have 27,000 products or so - and converting the data to work with master products (even using easy populate) would be a much larger task then writing the functions myself.

 

So I am basically after advise, the best way to tackle this. I am confident with PHP and mySQL, and my proposed way of tackling it is this:

 

1. Add an infobox to the top of the site, with two options - browse by track / browse by genre. Their answer will be stored in the users session as a boolean. Depending on their current selection the way product details are displayed will be altered (e.g. products with the same product_family will only be displayed once) - this could be a case of simply using an if clause around the sql query, and modifying it slightly.

 

2). Modify all of the relevant functions, e.g. advanced search, bestsellers and new products hot boxes - to use the currently selected display method

 

3). Add a function to add all items on the page to the cart at a discounted price. I'll add an extra discount_price field to the products table, and use that if they're purchasing ALL products with the same product_family.

 

Can anyone see any pitfuls or problems with this approach? Or any advice or tips would also be useful.

 

I'm currently estimating that this will take me around 20 - 25 hours to implement, so i'd also like any advice from anyone who's undertaken large custom changes to osc. to advise me on whether that sounds feasible or not?

 

Thanks for your time,

Mike

[subzerostudio]

anyone?