By products I mean tons of products. I am building a website for a business that sells Seals. They have many categories. Each seal has its own part number, a couple of images that go with them and also a table of data to provide more info on the product.

My client will want to go in and add/delete/edit products as needed when the time comes. As of this minute, the website is 0.5% complete. I just want to know if CMS can make this happen. Literally the admin panel will have nothing but "products" where the client can edit products.

If you know anything about this type of thing, can I get any tips? I've never done this before. Should I just have different pages for the products? Or should each product and its information be stored on a database and be edited from the database?

How should I go about doing this?

Thanks. I appreciate your time!

Hi,

As far as I can understand this you need an online catalog and not a store right..?

Should I just have different pages for the products?

Yes, you can make different folders for each category and for each product a page. this way you can filter them for structuring your catalog.

Or should each product and its information be stored on a database and be edited from the database?

Each product will be stored in the database after you are done with editing and saving the product page on the admin pages.

Please note: Couchcms search function is quite basic and maybe not sufficient for a large catalog.

[KK]

Hi @disturbed434,

As Tomarnst mentioned, each of your product would be a 'virtual' page (i.e will reside in the database and not be a physical file).

Number of products is not a problem as the database server takes care of this. However, a few points that you should consider before beginning your project -
1. Again as Tom stated, Couch's search functionality (from within the admin-panel) could be a problem if there are very large number of products.
2. More importantly, you stated -

I am building a website for a business that sells Seals

Now selling usually involves much more than just managing/displaying a products catalog.

You most likely will require a full fledged e-commerce solution like Magento if your site would also deal in taking and fulfilling orders.

Thank you for your responses.

I understand what you mean. First off, no there is no e-commerce on the website. They do sell Seals, but they do not want to sell them through the website. The website is only for catalog purposes... to display what they have for sale and to read about each product in detail.

So do you think Couch CMS is not the right route for me? Do you think there is another CMS fit for this kind of project? I mean I can do this from scratch too, but I'm very inexperienced in this specific subject of making an online catalog where the client can edit their products.

What do programmers usually do in this situation? Should I just learn it and do it from scratch since it's something I'm not experienced with?

Hi,

You have two options ;

1. use a e-commerce solution and disable the payment option. Most e-commerce solutions offer something like this often called B2B option.

2. use couchcms or some other simple to use cms and handle your products like blog posts. This way you avoid a complex program and you will be able to post your products easy.

I had the same problem and moved away from magento in favor of couchcms. Although still not totally ready and not in English yet, you can look at http://www.e-tukku.fi/catalog/mainostekstiilit/t-paidat/ for a product list example.

[KK]

@disturbed434, if ecommerce is not required I think you can use Couch for your site.
The large number of products shouldn't matter.