Gossamer Forum
Home : Products : Gossamer Links : Pre Sales :

Item in multiple Categories (Goal: multi-national directory)

Quote Reply
Item in multiple Categories (Goal: multi-national directory)
Hello, I need to build a multi-national directory of companies.

Say, we have companies in the sectors "Automotive", "Computer" and "Grocery" (in reality, we have over 100).
Then, we have the countries "Austria", "Germany" and "Switzerland".

We want our users to be able to search for "Computer"-companies in "Austria" (eventually, we even want to specify a city / ZIP code).
Of course, we don't want to organize our directory like this:

Austria
- Automotive
- Computer
- Grocery
Germany
- Automotive
- Computer
- Grocery
Switzerland
- Automotive
- Computer
- Grocery

Because that would be extremely redundant!
Is your software capable of handling this problem?
Of course the easy way would be to write down the country's name in the description of each link, so searching for "Wal-Mart Germany" would only show German Wal-Marts. However this is not exactly elegant.
Furthermore, we want the user to be able to search for the geographically nearest results. So, we would need to specify the country and the ZIP-code (I guess we need an additional plugin?).

Again, can all of this be easily achieved using Gossamer Links?

yours, KSchmidt

Quote Reply
Re: [kschmidt] Item in multiple Categories (Goal: multi-national directory) In reply to
Yes this can be done by updated search forms as desired. Just remember to use proper fields properties names and category numbers in search forms.

P.S.. I have no experience with zip code search, so can't help there.

Vishal

Vishal
-------------------------------------------------------

Last edited by:

SWDevil.Com: Jun 15, 2006, 2:06 PM
Quote Reply
Re: [SWDevil.Com] Item in multiple Categories (Goal: multi-national directory) In reply to
Thanks.
But as far as I can see, orthogonal Categories are NOT supported by GLinks!?
You know, it's not just Germany, Austria and Switzerland with hundreds of categories. Germany and Switzerland also have states (Bundesländer and Kantone). Those should be considered, too.

I mean in the US, you might look for a Gym in Austin, Texas. I'd like my search forms to support just this kind of request.
Can GLinks handle this or not? I thought some sales rep would reply here, too?
Quote Reply
Re: [kschmidt] Item in multiple Categories (Goal: multi-national directory) In reply to
Quote:
I mean in the US, you might look for a Gym in Austin, Texas. I'd like my search forms to support just this kind of request.
Can GLinks handle this or not?

Yeah it can be done.

An example of what I believe you are wanting to get done:

Category Structure
100 countries
..... 50 States in each country
..........20 Cities in each State
...............100 Links in each City.

Search Feature
Now you want to allow users the ability to search within any given country (lets say Germany, which has Category ID # 9) for product/store 'company'.

Then what you need to do is within the search form, make sure that category ID is selected for Germany (9). So the search results will be 'only' from the Germany Country and all its sub category, and they will not include any results from any other country.

In the same manner you can limit the search for any given state or city within any country too.

Now about the display. GLinks uses template structure, which in my opinion is very easy to customize to your desired look & if you wish you can even give each country its own design/layout too.

I hope this helps.

Vishal

Vishal
-------------------------------------------------------