Product Catalog: Bento > FMPro 11 > Web

[Globalksp]

I need your help.

Recently I took on the task of selling over 100 items of high end photographic equipment for a widow of a professional photographer. I am striving to make this as professional an operation as possible. I decided to dive into databases to manage and hopefully automate this project.

The end goal is to have a portion of my website dedicated to this sale. The inventory should be viewable but not editable online, and I'd like to have an order form that can be submitted via email / automatically updated in the database. I don't know how much of this is possible or feasible with my entry level knowledge of this software. Thanks for staying with me this far. Here is where I am currently at:

I created an inventory with data and photos in Bento 3 (OS X). Bento can export as PDF and PDFs can manifest themselves as HTML but limits the feeding back into the database.

I exported the data from Bento into File Maker Pro 11 via Excel.

I now have data in FMP 11. I'm stumbling around the layout designs to make something as attractive as the boxed Bento templates.

Specific questions:

Once I have my data and layout edited in FMP 11, what then?

How do I export all 100 records into separate web pages that are viewable but not editable?

How do I create an order form to gather customers information? Can/how data get back into the database?

Any help, opinions, thoughts, ideas, criticisms, etc... are welcome. Have a better idea for this product catalog than what I'm attempting to do?

You read to the end... I owe you a beer.

[comment]

I am afraid you still have a lot of work to do on the web part. PDF files do not "manifest themselves as HTML". Most modern browsers can display PDF documents - but not interact with them. If you want true HTML pages, you will need to create a HTML template, which you can then fill out with your data. Filemaker can help with the latter part (and so can other tools, perhaps more suitable for your project), but it will not export your layout design as HTML.

Also, 100 individual HTML pages do not a web site make. If you want users to navigate the site, you need to provide the means for that as well - not to mention ordering.

I would suggest you take your data (which could be a simple tab/comma separated text file) and deploy it on the web using PHP/MySQL or similar. You can still manage your data in Filemaker, but frankly there seems to be little advantage to this in your case.

[Globalksp]

Thanks for the reply and bringing me back to "reality".

On the PDF front, what I meant by manifest is that Acrobat will export a pdf as an html file. It's still not interactive but would solve the issues of needing to download a pdf.

Well... I'm stumped. I know nothing of PHP/MySQL. Perhaps I need to just forgo the design elements and make a clunky text based catalog?

[comment]

There are various levels at which you could do this: much depends on how much you are willing to put into it. At the simplest, I think, you need a master page listing all items, and a page for each item - with links to go to an item and come back to the list. That would take care of everything except the ordering (which I believe is the most problematic issue here).

The pages don't need to be clunky: one good thing about HTML is that you can link a simple HTML page to a CSS stylesheet to make it as fancy-looking as you want (perhaps you could use the export from Acrobat as a template for your design). So basically, one master page, 100 item pages (identical except for the item data) and one stylesheet would be it.

[Globalksp]

Having someone else spell things does wonders for simplifying your mind's workflow woes. Thank you.

Any idea if FileMaker could aid in creating those 100 item pages? Repetitive tasks like these are why I decided in using a database. Would I just be creating more work for myself in trying to avoid creating these 100 pages?

Edited May 25, 2010 by Guest

[comment]

Any idea if FileMaker could aid in creating those 100 item pages?

It could, but if you're not already proficient in Filemaker it's hardly the best route to follow - especially if you only need to do this once. I believe AppleScript would be a better tool, or perhaps even a mail merge in a word processor.