Custom Categories For Your Datafeed Site

I’m so happy to hear from affiliates who have followed in the datafeed series and created websites of their own! The other day, Jen Goode showed me a site she was working on, and brought up a common problem with datafeeds: how to categorize the products.

I was able to do this using simple like queries:

select * from products where MerchantSubcategory like '%green tea%' or MerchantCategory like '%green tea%' order by Name;

But sometimes this isn’t the case. Sometimes you have to (gasp!) manually categorize the products. To do this, start with some changes to the products table:

ALTER TABLE  `products` ADD  `MyCategory` VARCHAR( 10 ) NOT NULL ;
ALTER TABLE  `products` ADD INDEX (  `MyCategory` ) ;

Then create an admin page for you to categorize the products. Use the admin-sas-datafeed.php as your template, but change the inside code to:

<?php

if (!empty($_POST['ProductID']) && !empty($_POST['MyCategory'])) {
	mysql_query("update products set MyCategory='" . myres($_POST['MyCategory']) . "' where ProductID=" . (int)$_POST['ProductID'] . " limit 1");
	echo("<p>The product has been updated.</p>");
} // ends

$cQuery = "select * from products where MyCategory='' limit 1";
$oResult = mysql_query($cQuery);
if ($rsData = mysql_fetch_array($oResult)) {
	?>
	<form name="productForm" method="post" action="<?= $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] ?>">
		<input type="hidden" name="ProductID" value="<?= (int)$rsData['ProductID'] ?>" />
		<table width="500">
			<tr>
				<td><a href="/item.php?ProductID=<?= (int)$rsData['ProductID'] ?>" target="_blank"><?= $rsData['Name'] ?></a>: </td>
				<td><select name="MyCategory" onChange="document.forms['productForm'].submit();">
					<option value="">Choose</option>
					<option value="green-tea">Green Tea</option>
					<option value="white-tea">White Tea</option>
					<option value="black-tea">Black Tea</option>
					<option value="oolong-tea">Oolong Tea</option>
					<option value="tea-pot">Tea Pot</option>
					<option value="tea-cup">Tea Cup</option>
					<option value="junk">Do Not Use</option>
				</select></td>
			</tr>
			<tr>
				<td></td>
				<td><input type="submit" name="cAction" value="Submit" /></td>
			</tr>
		</table>
	</form>
	<?php
} // ends if ($rsData = mysql_fetch_array($oResult))
else {
	echo("<p><strong>Congratulations</strong>! All products have been categorized!</p>");
} // ends else from if ($rsData = mysql_fetch_array($oResult))
?>

What this does is update the “MyCategory” field for each product. Then, your SQL query on the browse page is simply:

select * from products where MyCategory='green-tea' order by Name;

Don’t worry – when you update the datafeed (by downloading a new zip file and uploading it in the admin tool you built before), the MyCategory field isn’t touched!

Now you can categorize products however you’d like – enjoy!

Tagged as: Datafeeds, PHP, Programming