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Manufacturers
The manufacturers feature allows
you to assign products to manufacturers and display in a category
format along with their logo and description. Here is a sample
of how the page might look
Clicking on the logo or manufacturer name will
take you to the page where all the products you have assigned to
the manufacturer will appear.
Setting up the manufacturers page
Setting up the page is very simple indeed. Make a copy of
of categories.asp or categories.php and save it as manufacturers.asp
or manufacturers.php There is nothing more to it than that.
Setting up a manufacturer through the control panel
In your admin main page of the store control panel, click
on the link entitled "Edit Manufacturers" and the click on the
button "Click to Add New".
The only obligatory field is the name of the manufacturer.
The address / contact details of the manufacturer will not be
displayed publicly on the store. Only enter an URL for the static
page if you plan using the static page feature,
otherwise leave it blank.
Once you have set up the Manufacturers you should see
them displayed in the admin like this
The order column is the order that they will be listed
on your public Manufacturers store page. The id is the identifier
of the manufacturer in the database and can be used in conjunction
with the static page feature.
Assigning a product to a manufacturer
To assign a product to the manufacturer you will need
to go to the product admin page and click on Modify for the product
you wish to add. Select the Manufacturer from the drop down choices
Click on Submit at the bottom of the products admin page
and that's all there should be to it.
Tweaks
Adding the manufacturers link to the main categories page
If
you want a link in with your main categories to the manufacturers
page you set up then all you need to do is set up a new category
and call it "Products by Manufacturer" for example. Then in
the Category URL (Optional) field enter the URL of the page ie
manufacturers.asp or manufacturers.php. Please note that discounts
/ coupons cannot be applied to this category, they would need
to be applied to the individual products or the main category
those products were placed in.
Setting up static pages
If you want your manufacturer product pages to have a
static URL then carry out the following:
ASP Version: Save products.asp as yourstaticpage.asp. Find the
line
<!--#include file="vsadmin/inc/incproducts.asp"-->
and just before it add
<% explicitmanid=1 %>
...where "1" is the id of the manufacturer.
PHP Version: Save products.php as yourstaticpage.php.
Find the line
<?php include "vsadmin/inc/incproducts.php" ?>
and just before it add
<?php
$explicitmanid=1;
?>
...where "1" is the id of the manufacturer.
Finally in your manufacturers admin page, add the static
URL to the field labeled "Static URL (optional)".
Dynamic titles and meta tags
The manufacturers page will allow for these search
engine friendly features.
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