Need to turn on/off different categories

[qualityonedesigns]

Hello,
I need to be able to turn on/off a category in the shopping cart. My customer runs a flower shop and she offers seasonal flowers. When the season is over, she needs to be able to turn off the link to that category.

How do I go about doing this task?

Thank You,
Matt

[bkpie]

Check out this contribution osCommerce Community Add-Ons

[met00]

Please remember that unless the change looks to see if the item has an active/inactive flag set before displaying and acts on that flag, then there could be problems.

One version of this that I saw used a simple flag to determine if the category was able to be listed. The end user had the category on for a while, and then turned it off. They thought doing so would make the category "unseen" by the user and thus items in it would be un-purchasable.

Thus the problem. The items had been indexed by google and people were still able to get to the category and the items in the category to purchase them directly from the search engines. Thus the whole purpose was killed as even though the flag to "not display" was set, the items were still able to be purchased.

A decent add-on for this feature must be able to allow the items to remain in the back end (for use next season), but at the same time, must not allow the items to be displayed when they are not active.

This then brings up the question on what to do when an inactive item is displayed. A good add on will provide you with the option of allowing you to display an appropriate message, a bad one will just force a redirect to the home page with no message to the user. A really good one will force the redirect, but will also open a in-line DTML message explaining why they were redirected and suggest other products that they might be interested in based on the product that they selected.

In other words, a simple flag on active/inactive is NOT a good solution as you really want the system to be able to do more than that.

[michael_s]

A simple workaround to the above scenario would be to set all the products in the category as inactive. Then use the mod suggested. This will disable the display of the category and the category will be empty and display nothing even if google indexes the pages. Then re-activate the products when you need them.

I admit it is not the most elegant solution, but it is a 'here and now' working solution with minimal coding needed. If you want a properly coded solution, time to dig out the php skillz...