We want to manually select a list of products that are ‘Featured Items’ and display them in various blocks (sometimes in the mainbox, sometimes the right, etc.)
To do this is incredibly tedious in CS-Cart as the only way is to manually select products within each block and in the case of blocks that show up only on certain Pages you have to do it for each page also.
First though can anyone thing of a better way to to do this with least modifications than this method:
- Create a category ‘Featured Items’ and set status to hidden.
- Assign all featured item’s Secondary Category to the Featured Items Category
- Create a new block filling option called ‘Category’ with an associated Specific Setting of the Category ID (seleted from the Category pop-up selection window). The fill would select all products in that category. This would be the most flexible version, but in the name of simplicity and speed we would probably start with a new filling called ‘Featured Category’ and just hard code it to the Featured Category.
Can anyone think of a better way to do it?
If this is the best way within the CS-Cart framework, then next comes the question I see asked but rarely see any good answers and that is how to create new block setting options (filling types, appearance types) I know it is controlled in schemas but it seems this is 1) an area of CS-Cart that lacks configurable flexibility in comparison to the rest of the software, and 2) has no documentation whatsoever as how to add new setting.