When building a modern and scalable webshop, one of the largest and most time-consuming tasks is not the design or the frontend functionality - it's creating and structuring the underlying data. Before customers can browse products or place orders, a vast amount of data work needs to be done behind the scenes.
In DynamicWeb this can involve:
- Creating data models and/or channels
- Creating custom product attributes and attribute groups
- Decide on how you want to handle assets and images
- Creating commerce languages and currencies
- If relevant, handling variants and stocks and units
Each of these elements requires careful planning, setup, and maintenance as the complexity multiplies as catalogs grow, product structures become more detailed, and customer expectations rise. As a result, the groundwork of data modeling often becomes the cornerstone or bottleneck of any successful implementation.
However involved the above process is, the products are added to frontend in the same manner - by using a product catalog app!
The Product Catalog apps
To render products in frontend you use one of our Product Catalog apps - preferably the Product Catalog for ViewModel or (if you can't avoid it) the older and slower Product Catalog (eCom). Both of these apps fundamentally do the same thing; renders a product list and a product details template in the page where they're added.
Using either of the apps you will:
- Select a subset of product (via an index query)
- Configure various display related settings such as the number of products to show per page if you're implementing paging
- Select or create the templates which control what the list and details view looks like
In the product catalog templates you want to make it possible to add products to a shopping cart - this is done using so-called cart commands - read more here.