Mechanism to compare items?

Hi there,

Thank you very much for responding to me.

In response to your question below about different content types being used for comparisons: no, at least not at first.

Here is why. The standard use case for a feature like this is to have the ability to show, side by side, the values of similar items. For example, It is very helpful to see the statistics (price, fuel efficiency, legroom, etc.) on two cars side by side, but to compare two completely different content types together would make no logical sense. For example, a car and a microwave oven: the unique fields would not be the same.

The web site user would be interested in showing many similar items side by side, sometimes 10 or more items. But not completely dissimilar items and content types.

Best regards,
Eric

Hello

i see

just when i described needs for compare feature, i meant needs for any web-site, not just the scenario in your web-site

Regards

Hi there,

No problem. I understood what you meant. I was speaking as a product manager in the software field - analyzing the use cases for all web sites. I manage a portfolio of software products in my day job. In my experience, comparing vastly dissimilar types of items (e.g. airplane to beach ball) would not be effective.

However, there could be some uncommon cases where that assumption would be incorrect.

Are you hearing from other customers that they need to have the ability to compare items from different content types? If so, it would be interesting to hear their use cases and how they differ from my experience.

Best Regards,
Eric

maybe to 3 way
-compare only item with same type (side by side)
-compare item without same type and display only commun field
-compare item without same type and display all field but a message in uncommun line

micker wrote: maybe to 3 way
-compare only item with same type (side by side)
-compare item without same type and display only commun field
-compare item without same type and display all field but a message in uncommun line

Hi there,

Those are definitely good examples of how it would be architected and huge data displayed. Another important thing to consider here is the business reason: why an organization want to allow their users to compare vastly dissimilar items. In other words, even though it is possible to create the ability to compare items that are not the same content type, would any FLEXIcontent customers want that capability? If so, why?

I can imagine that this would be needed if the creator of the web site had many different, but very similar content types. For example, a real estate site may have items for bank owned properties and items for normal sale properties. So while they are different types, they are still similar enough to warrant the ability to compare the properties based on price, location, size, etc.

Again, this is only valid if the web site creator has set up the content types to be similar enough that a comparison would provide value to the web site user.

Is that the scenario you envisioned?

Best regards,
Eric

Did anything ever come of this feature request? We're looking for a powerful CCK with the ability for a user to filter and/or compare items with hundreds of attributes. FlexiContent looks good but so far I don't see anything mentioned in the features about comparison capability.