MiniVend's demo catalog shows many of MiniVend's features -- list and
category building via controlled search or query, random selection of
feature items, templating with active elements, etc. But each feature has
its cost in complexity and performance. The more you ask the computer to do
for every page it displays, the less performance you can expect under high
load.
Some things that have been found to be popular:
- Category searches
-
If you have only a small number of products, hard coded pages are just
fine, though you would be surprised how much of a maintenance headache they
are compared to database definitions. If you have any number of products
though, you will want to categorize them so that customers can easily find
them. Pick a field in your database, perhaps named
category, and classify them for search by MiniVend.
- Images
-
You can easily place a thumbnail image (perhaps with a link to a blowup)
only for those items that have them. The best way to do this is with an
image field in the database; if you do file tests for every image in a
large list it can degrade system performance.
- Related items
-
On a product's individual display page, you can embed searches of similar
products with the
[query ...] or [loop ...] tags. If you develop customer data, you can even search a past order
database and present products that previous buyers of that product have
selected.
- Reviews/Testimonials
-
You can key the placement on the existence of a file in a certain
directory. This is very reasonable to do when a user is viewing a single
product.