A product/reference/item database in WP, how?

  • zoomer5

    (@zoomer5)


    4 years ago

    I want to build a website offering product comparison tables. More in depth than what you usually see, though, and with a lot more products. These products aren’t mine, so a solution geared towards an online shop such as WooCommerce wouldn’t be ideal. It should basically be a database with plenty of custom fields. Ideally, products should be able to have one (or more!) products attached to them, so you can see all the cross references (i.e. the comparison has links to a detailed article on product A baked in (“see details”). Additionally, on the page/post for product A, you see links to product B, C and D, because these four products share the same category, e.g. “Headphones”).

    Is there a good, versatile plugin for this? I can code, so I thought that a make shift solution could be to manage data outside of WP altogether in separate database tables and coding the main features (comparison table) myself. I really don’t want to go the plugin route, I am afraid this would add too much overhead.

    Any input appreciated ??

    Daniel

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  • catacaustic

    (@catacaustic)

    I really don’t want to go the plugin route, I am afraid this would add too much overhead.

    That’s completely wrong. What you’re asking for is a whole heap of custom functionality, and that’s 100% where a plugin should be used. And remember that the files for all of that need to be *somewhere*, so there’s really no performance overhead. On top of that, keeping it all as a plugin (from the repository here or something custom) is by far the best way to do it and lets you change/update themes at any time without loosing that functionality.

    As far as comparisons go, a search in the repository here will give you some ideas. A single plugin may not do everything that you want, so you will probably need a combination of plugins from here and some custom work to get things just the way you want them.

    Thread Starter zoomer5

    (@zoomer5)

    Combining several plugins I don’t have control over (or I CAN control, after reading myself into it, but then the whole update thing goes down the drain)? I don’t know, that sounds like things get more complicated.
    The plugins behing the repo link all look very basic, no filtering capabilities… I think I’m gonna end up coding my own tool.

    Thanks for your help!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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