[alert]Important! This article describes how to control Brand List (on homepage and dedicated “Shop by Brand” page) and Brand Pages themselves, showing brand description and most popular brand products. Event though same brand images are used for filtering products in categories, this feature does not offer any control over Brand Filters in product categories. This feature also has no control over what Brands are available for sale in TT11 Catalog.
It is planned to extend Brand Pages module to also include interfaces for managing and configuring Brand Product Availability in different countries. At the moment his functionality is controlled directly from the code in “Magforge_Tableten_Model_ProductLimit” class.[/alert]
Brand List
On TT11 website Brand list is presented in the form of grid of Brand logos only, there’s no other view that would show all available brands. This list is constructed based on the values of “onec_manufacturer” attribute in Magento that were not selected as “hidden” in module configuration. Whenever new value is added to this attribute, for example as a result of an import of new product from Erply that had a new value in “Brand” field, it will show up in the list of Brands in text form. To stop showing a Brand in the list you need to select it in “Hide Brands” setting in module configuration.
Brand Logos
To show image instead of text in Brand list an image should be prepared manually in exact size and properties like other brand images already visible on the website. Image should be in .PNG format. Image name should match the URI of brand page, for example: schildkrot.png, dr-neubauer.png, sauer-and-troger.png
Image should be uploaded to /public_html/media/manuf_logos/
Brands visibility in .FR shop
To hide brands from the list and not show products when brand page is opened using direct link, go to module configuration, select French Website (not French language under TT11 – France, but “TT11 – France” itself) in Store View selector and select brands that should be hidden in Hide Brands” setting.
Brand Pages
These are completely dynamic pages, they are compiled dynamically and URLs like “/other_eng/sauer-and-troger” or “/other_eng/butterfly” are parced programmatically and compared with “onec_manufacturer” attribute values converted to URL-like strings and if such match is found, then Brand page is rendered with or without description and products.
Description
When rendering brand page, system checks if there is a Static Block (CMS > Static Blocks in Admin) with identifier like “brand_sauer-and-troger” where “brand_” part is static and “sauer-and-troger” is a URI of the brand page. If such block is found it’s content is included at the top of brand page as description.
Products
If there are any products under given Brand they will be displayed in blocks of max four products grouped by Type (Attribute Set according to Magento terms) showing most popular (with highest number of views) products of this type. There is no manual control over what products will be displayed. The order of product types is set in Magforge_Tableten_Helper_Data::getProductTypesOrder().
Caching
Since Brand page rendering takes time, caching is implemented. This allows consecutive Brand page loads to be much faster that initial one. Because of caching, if you update description for example, you might not see changes right away. To see changes right away you need to refresh “Magforge Custom Cache” on Cache Management page in Magento Admin.