A few questions on Hika

I had been working in VM from time to timer and I have come across Hika and have read rave reviews. Certain things of VM really make something more complex than it should and it seems Hika can do things that I want to do more easily.

After looking around in a installation, I have come up with some questions:

1. Can I have different templates for different products? Meaning, VM has views you can choose for particular products. I need this because some products are technical and need specs things that other products do not and the look of the page needs to be different. If this is possible, how to do this as I can work it out.

2. Can I set up a new html/txt editor box to be able enter in content for different tabs. And can I make new tabs. For instance I may have Main Description | Specifications | Awards which all need html to add into it. How do I achieve this?

3. I want to put items like clothing or ipad cases that have different colours in them. Is it possible to have a checkbox or dropdown list; so that then I click on the colour or size that it will change the main image?

4. Similar question to 3, but if I have a tablet case and it has different models like "for iPad mini, iPad Air, Samsung Galaxy tab", can I make it so that if they select different size itr will go to that product listing? Alternatively be better to be able to update wirthout needing to load a new page so that it refreshes live.

I dont need the site to sell anything as its just for a vendor site with no direct end consumer sales, its just for product catalogue.

Thanks a lot.

Hi,

1. Yes, by default there is 3 views for the product page. You can select different one via the product edition page, or category edition page. And hten edit these views via the menu Display > Views in order to have the desired layout.

2. You can select the text editor you want. To make new tabs, you have to edit the view "product / show_tabular" and add some HTML to have new tabs.

3. The best way is to use the characteristics, this way it will generate many vairants for your product, variants have independent settings, so you can set one or many images per variant. And the images will be displayed based on the value selected in the dropdown on the product page.

4. What you need seems to be related on the listings, for the listings you can potentially use the filters to filter on what kind of product you want. Filters can be applied on a lot of things like the custom fields, and thanks to the custom fields, you can filter on what you want.

Hope this will help you.

Seems Hika is a lot more powerful or flexible than VM then.

So its only possible to have 3 templates for a product then? Not that I need more, but just for my reference. I should only need 3.

As for the restg that you replied, thanks. I will need to have a look into it further and try to work it out. I guess if I cant I will come back here, many thanks

Thakns for the reply.

So how does one over ride these layouts? Is it the same way VM and Joomla do it?

I was looking at a template from Gavick that uses Hika but they do have a template which I think is an override but when looking at to choose an alternative layout, it seems only the normsal 3 are there but looking at the front end it is different. So it has confused me a bit as I want to use Hika on a separate site.

Thanks.

Thanks Nick.

It took me a little while to get my head around it, but when I read what you wrote here its exactly how it is. I am only setting the site up for product catalog and nothing will be bought. So far it is a brilliant system, far superior than VM. I commend you and the rest of the team on the work as its a very good system and mostly what you need out of the box.

I just need to work out how to do more tabs now. I will re-read what is said above and hopefully it makes more sense to me now.

I just have one other question.

Is it possible to create a buttons as options for choosing colour? Meaning I have red, blue, pink ipad case for example and I want to show the colours in a png (or even a CSS coded box is ok), is it possible to do this? I think it would be possible to do if I had a radio button list, but I also need dropdown for other options and not radio.

Thanks.

Xavier wrote: Hi,

1. Yes, by default there is 3 views for the product page. You can select different one via the product edition page, or category edition page. And hten edit these views via the menu Display > Views in order to have the desired layout.

2. You can select the text editor you want. To make new tabs, you have to edit the view "product / show_tabular" and add some HTML to have new tabs.

3. The best way is to use the characteristics, this way it will generate many vairants for your product, variants have independent settings, so you can set one or many images per variant. And the images will be displayed based on the value selected in the dropdown on the product page.

4. What you need seems to be related on the listings, for the listings you can potentially use the filters to filter on what kind of product you want. Filters can be applied on a lot of things like the custom fields, and thanks to the custom fields, you can filter on what you want.

Hope this will help you.

I also wanted to add a slider/accordion part in the right column which also brings up html/data which is not part of the tabs. Only way I can think of is from the above also.

I can do this with a custom field I guess?

Thanks.

nicolas wrote: Hi,

1. You can change the characteristics display to be a radio and not a dropdown with the option "Characteristic display method" of the HikaShop configuration. Once you do that, if you enter the HTML img tag of your color images in the values of the characteristics, you'll get a radio list with the color images for the selection.
That however means that all the characteristics will display like that.
If you want different characteristics to display differently, there is no option but you can tweak the code for that if you want. That would require to edit the file administrator/components/com_hikashop/types/charactersitic.php but you need to be a developer for that.

2. Yes, if you need extra data for your products, you'll want to create a new custom field of the table "product" via the menu Display>Custom fields. You'll be able to easily access it in the product page layout view file with such code:
<?php echo $this->element->FIELD; ?>
where FIELD is the column name of your custom field.

Thanks a lot for the reply Nick. I guess I will just have to live with dropdowns or do it manually in a custom field

Many thanks for the code, brilliant and easy.