Basic configuration of osCommerce, continued - Product Listing
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This section controls how you intend your products to be viewed on the site. Pretty much anything and everything from whether you actually want to display a product image at all, to whether you want to display its name or the name of the manufacturer, gets done here. This is a straightforward section with no difficult options to research-or so it would seem. Of course, depending on what you are selling, you might want different properties for your products altogether. By this I mean that if you are a book retailer, then it is unlikely you want to mention Display Product Manufacturer Name at all, but rather Display Product Publisher Name, or something to that effect.
Oh dear! What are we going to do if the actual properties we are configuring are not even the correct ones? Well, the quick answer is that we will get to a stage a little later on where we can configure our product attributes, amongst other things-and of course, we'll cheat by exploiting the difference between what we as the site's administrators see in the admin tool, and what the client viewing the catalog sees!
All the settings barring the last two are used to determine whether a product attribute is displayed, and if so, the value set for that attribute determines the order in which it is shown on the site. For the moment, configure those properties that you are sure you will use, and make a note of those which you believe will need to change. The following screenshot shows the settings for the demo site:
Looking through the settings shown in the previous screenshot, you can see that we want to display, in order, the product image, the manufacturer's name, the product's name, its price, and finally the Buy Now button. You might be asking yourself why-if it has already been mentioned that, as a book retailer, we don't want to Display Product Manufacturer Name-are we putting it in the line-up. The answer to this has presented itself almost too perfectly-look at the Display Product Manufacturer Name line closely in the previous screenshot. You will notice there is a spelling mistake. However, if you look at the results of these settings in the catalog:
you will notice that the column heading Manufacturer is spelled correctly. This means that what is shown on the screen is not directly linked to the name given for a property in the admin tool. So, we can choose to show the manufacturer in our product listing, but this does not mean we have to make the column heading in the catalog site Manufacturer; we could, if we were so inclined, change it to Publisher. This, however, will come a bit later on in the story. What's more important than this for now is that you have related the settings made to the product listing on the site page.
The final two settings are slightly different in that they deal more with navigation than anything else. Notice in the admin tool that Display Category/Manufacturer Filter is set to 1. The resulting filter when enabled in this manner is shown above the product listing in line with Let's See What We Have Here. It is a good idea to include this, as people often have some sort of brand loyalty and would wish to search your catalog for specific brands.
Finally, Location of Prev/Next Navigation Bar is set to 3. Why have we done this, and what is the prev/next navigation bar? Well, when you get round to populating your database and enter the multitude of goodies you have for sale, you will get to a stage where the number of products in a category is greater than the number of products you are willing to display on the page. Incidentally, we have already set the number of items to display per page property in the Search Results setting in the Maximum Values section.
Once that happens, the navigation bar (at present only displays Displaying 1 to 3 (of 3 products)) will be the customer's method of hopping from one page in the product listing to another. Now, I don't know about you, but I hate scrolling down to the bottom of a page only to find that I have to go right back to the top to click on the Next page link. Conversely, if I only want to look at the first couple of items and then go to the Next page, I certainly don't want to be forced to scroll to the bottom to do so. Setting this property to 3 ensures that you will make it easier for your customer to navigate your product listings by having a navigation bar at the top and bottom of the page.
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 This article is excerpted from Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition, written by David Mercer (PACKT, 2005; ISBN: 1904811140). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today. Buy this book now.
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