Need tips on a big project

Sunday 01 July 2007 11:10:52 am

That's al lot of objects! You will need top notch hardware for this

For the user side: to set up an efficient way of finding, your best bet is actually to use a form of facetted navigation/search .... some major e-commerce sites use this. The user side may be implemented with the Solr search plugin as faceted navigation on meta-data is one of the main goodies it provides. It will be released soon now. If you want early access code, mail me. Another advantage of this plugin is that it stores the index outside of the eZ Publish DB.

For the administrators, you can use object relations or select fields, with a customised edit template for quickly adding the meta-data. Object relations are the way to go for meta-data like manufacturer, family of products, categories. For the others, maybe select fields are more appropriate.

In order to keep performance levels, use either manufacturer or categories as main nodes. The number of children you can have should not exceed a few (maybe tens of) thousands per subtree.

I hope this helps you a bit
Paul

eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training
http://twitter.com/paulborgermans

Thursday 12 July 2007 10:50:54 am

Hi,

This is a really interesting challenge.

I would consider the number of manufacturers, products, categories, families, designs, materials, etc. prior to choosing a navigation scheme.

For administration, I would probably organize the products under main nodes of manufacturers, then categories. For the site visitor view, I would offer the products under both category and manufacturers.

I would also consider dividing the system to make it more managable. 250 000 products is a huge number, and most site visitors would only access a subset of them. Based on the target market, it may be good to create a portal approach, where a top-level site offers access to a group of subdomains, which group related products. This would greatly reduce the size of the database needed to run the system, and improve performance. Development would not be significantly impacted, because the same code could manage all the subdomains.

Good luck!