Enhancing the User Experience [ 138 ] Gift purchases The complication of gift purchases is that the purchases need to be stored with the delivery address from the customer who created the wish list. The difculty here is that, at any stage, the delivery address should not be presented to the user making the purchase, as this is private information. Self purchases Self purchases should be very straightforward to handle. Essentially, all the customer would be doing is adding their own wish-list product to their own shopping basket, the only difference being that we must maintain a record that this is from their wish list up until the point of their order being nalized; then we must remove the product from their wish-list completely, to prevent them from making a duplicate purchase. Improving the wish list There are a number of ways in which we could improve the wish-list feature we have added to our framework, including: Multiple lists per customer, allowing customers to maintain separate lists Garbage collection for session-based wish-list products, ensuring we don't have useless data in our database Transferring of session-based wish-list products to user account-based wish-list products when a user is logged in Model, as we didn't implement a model with this wish list, and we should do so to make it easier to extend Priority isn't considered or displayed to the customer, or anyone who would like to buy the product as a gift for someone Quantities, at present, they are not considered when adding a product to a list; perhaps we should look for existing products in the wish list and increment their quantity Public and private lists, allowing customers to have a private list, and also a public list of items they may wish for others to purchase for them These improvements are ones you should investigate by adding yourself. • • • • • • • This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 5 [ 139 ] Recommendations Sometimes, we may nd that certain products go hand in hand, or that customers interested in certain products also nd another group of products interesting or relevant. If we can suggest some relevant products to our customers, we increase the chances of them making a new purchase or adding something else to their shopping basket. There are two methods of recommendation that we should look into: Displaying related products on a products page E-mailing customers who have made certain purchases to inform them of some other products they may be interested in Related products The simplest way to inform customers of related products from within the product view is to maintain a relationship of related products within the database and within the products model, so we could cache the result of a subset of these related products. This way, the controller needs to only detect that there are more than zero related products, insert the relevant template bit into the view, and then associate the cached query as the template tag variable to ensure that they are displayed. There are a few ways in which we can maintain this relationship of related products: Within the products table we maintain a serialized array of related product IDs We group related products together by themes We relate pairs of related products together A serialized array isn't the most effective way to store related product data. Relating them by themes would prove problematic with multiple themes, and also when it comes to the administrator relating products to each other, as they would have to select or create a new theme. Relating pairs of products together would require a little trick with the query to get the product name, as the ID of the product being viewed could be one of two elds, as illustrated by the following table structure: ID (Integer, Primary Key, Auto Increment) ProductA (Integer) ProductB (Integer) • • • • • • • • This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Enhancing the User Experience [ 140 ] The difference between using productA or productB to store a particular product reference would be determined by the administration panel we develop. So if we were to view and edit a product in the administration panel, and we chose to set a related product, the product we were currently viewing would be productA and the related one, productB. The SQL for this table structure is as follows: CREATE TABLE `product_relevant_products` ( `ID` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment, `productA` int(11) NOT NULL, `productB` int(11) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`ID`), KEY `productB` (`productB`), KEY `productA` (`productA`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=3 ; ALTER TABLE `product_relevant_products` ADD CONSTRAINT `product_relevant_products_ibfk_2` FOREIGN KEY (`productB`) REFERENCES `content` (`ID`) ON DELETE CASCADE ON UPDATE CASCADE, ADD CONSTRAINT `product_relevant_products_ibfk_1` FOREIGN KEY (`productA`) REFERENCES `content` (`ID`) ON DELETE CASCADE ON UPDATE CASCADE; We can get round the issue of the fact that the current product ID could be found in both the productA and productB columns in the database with an IF statement within our query. The IF statement would work by checking to see if productA is the product the customer is viewing; if it is, then the name of productB is returned; otherwise, the name of productB is returned. This gives us a query such as the following, where CURRENT_PRODUCT_ID is the ID of the product the customer is currently viewing. SELECT IF(rp.productA<>CURRENT_PRODUCT_ID,v.name,vn.name) AS product_name, IF(rp.productA<>CURRENT_PRODUCT_ID,c.path,cn.path) AS product_path, rp.productA, rp.productB, c.path AS cpath, cn.path AS cnpath, c.ID AS cid, cn.ID AS cnid FROM content c, content cn, product_relevant_products rp, content_versions v, content_versions vn WHERE (rp.productA= CURRENT_PRODUCT_ID OR rp.productB= CURRENT_PRODUCT_ID) AND c.ID=rp.productA AND cn.ID=rp.productB AND v.ID=c.current_revision AND vn.ID=cn.current_revision This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 5 [ 141 ] As we may have a lot of related products, we may wish to put a limit on the number of related products displayed, and randomize the results. SELECT IF(rp.productA<>CURRENT_PRODUCT_ID,v.name,vn.name) AS product_name, IF(rp.productA<>CURRENT_PRODUCT_ID,c.path,cn.path) AS product_path, rp.productA, rp.productB, c.path AS cpath, cn.path AS cnpath, c.ID AS cid, cn.ID AS cnid FROM content c, content cn, product_relevant_products rp, content_versions v, content_versions vn WHERE (rp.productA= CURRENT_PRODUCT_ID OR rp.productB= CURRENT_PRODUCT_ID) AND c.ID=rp.productA AND cn.ID=rp.productB AND v.ID=c.current_revision AND vn.ID=cn.current_revision ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 5 Controlling the related products If we create a new function within our controller to run our random related products query, cache the result, and associate the cached results with a template variable, all we would need to do is call this function from within the product view function, passing the product ID as the parameter. private function relatedProducts( $currentProduct ) { $relatedProductsSQL = "SELECT ". " IF(rp.productA<>{$currentProduct},v.name,vn.name) AS product_name, IF(rp.productA<>{$currentProduct},c.path,cn.path) AS product_path, rp.productA, rp.productB, c.path as cpath, cn.path AS cnpath, c.ID AS cid, cn.ID AS cnid ". " FROM ". " content c, content cn, product_relevant_products rp, content_versions v, content_versions vn". " WHERE ". " (rp.productA={$currentProduct} OR rp.productB={$currentProduct}) ". " AND c.ID=rp.productA ". " AND cn.ID=rp.productB ". " AND v.ID=c.current_revision ". " AND vn.ID=cn.current_revision ". " ORDER BY RAND() ". " LIMIT 5"; $relatedProductsCache = $this->registry->getObject('db')-> cacheQuery( $relatedProductsSQL ); $this->registry->getObject('template')->getPage()-> addTag('relatedproducts', array( 'SQL', $relatedProductsCache )); } This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Enhancing the User Experience [ 142 ] The following line calls our new function: $this->relatedProducts( $productData['ID'] ); Viewing the related products Related products are now cached and associated with a template variable. We now need to add relevant mark up into our view product template, to display related products. <h2>Related products</h2> <! START relatedproducts > <div class="floatingbox"> <a href="products/view/{product_path}">{product_name}</a> </div> <! END relatedproducts > Of course, we can style this to however we wish: we could display them as small boxes alongside each other, or we could also use JavaScript to toggle between them. However, for now, a simple list or oating <div> should sufce. Here, beneath the product details, we have a list of related products: E-mail recommendations There is only so much we can do for this feature at the moment, as it requires our customers to have made some purchases, and at the moment, we don't have the functionality available for customers to make a purchase. However, we can discuss what would be involved in creating this feature: This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 . copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 5 [ 139 ] Recommendations Sometimes, we may nd that certain products go hand. copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 5 [ 141 ] As we may have a lot of related products, we may wish to put a limit. material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Enhancing the User Experience [ 140 ] The difference between using