Aggregating separate content and files into a single page.
There's a lot of moving parts here for pages like this so pick and choose your recipe from some of the below ingredients.
Merchants that need consulting, or to explore such customizations can contact me directly by email for services.
Please always provide context, examples: post url(s) , store url, theme name, or any further detail.
Contact Info in signature.
Search and SEO
It's not clear if by "discoverability" or "metadata search" you mean onsite search to help visitor/customers find your stuff. Or if your looking to improve SEO.
While the two can related it's important to focus on one thing at a time.
SEO is a very broad vague topic where you'd have to ask specific questions to get anywhere.
Keep in mind when moving things around , changing url structures, etc that may impact SEO if you've invested in it or built up ranking becoming another factor.
Onsite search , on shopify for the online-sales channel if you make a page the onsite search can find it, arbitrary files not so much as they generally only exist as part of content i.e. a pdf is a link on a page not it's own page. So if you want someone to be able to find "pdf" directly you'd want a page just named /pages/my-pdf.
Note storefront filters apply to products and collections and search, not pages
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/themes/customizing-themes/storefront-filters
There are plenty of third party apps/services to build to suit more custom search needs.
@boltthecolt wrote:
These free downloads/links have grown out of control
...
Perhaps this is a task Low cost and low maintenance are a priority
The first part is related to the second, if you want deep long term control over curation low cost is counter to that. Low maintenance is possible but often at a high upfront time/cost to work out how the actual information architecture is structured, or how it's management system works.
Is that example link your website, or an example of your stuff being listed without permission because of no access control.
Because it's not clear if discovery is a joke because you have to much to manage or other websites are taking your stuff.
Do you need to be able to:
- organize different content types and digital files as free, or others freely available resources as free.
- or prevent access to the files so they do not get listed on ebooks sites
Assuming #1 moving uploads to shopify , tracking, organizing , curating, AND THEN centralizing it all for display AND THEN needing "discoverability" or "metadata search" are very different things.
Adding/uploading
Make sure the files you'll move wont go over the maximums.
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/shopify-admin/productivity-tools/file-uploads
For images shopify may serve the images in different file formats than uploaded ,generally .webp format. For performance a shopify theme may also serve images at different sizes than uploaded; you just have to make sure any download links link to the full size image.
Tracking
Files
The dead simplest way in most systems to track your free files is to just bake "free" into the file name when that system has a file search; could get some bonus SEO juice depending on your setup.
In the shopify files admin it be simple to make a saved-search matching "free".
Shopify's recently made it so you can see where files are being used such as in theme settings https://changelog.shopify.com/posts/theme-file-usage-now-tracked-in-the-file-section-in-admin , though the file search "used in" filter for usage sucks since there's currently only two options "product media" and "other"(which behaves oddly)
Content
In shopify blog /articles can be tagged , however /pages have no tagging or grouping ability so could be easy to loose which pages contain free content|resources so would probably want a metafield-definition boolean set on page objects to aid future digging.
Organizing
Shopify metaobjects may be able to help with content organization needing more than rich-text in a /pages article in the shopify pages admin.
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/custom-data/metaobjects
But these fields are have no native way to be autopopulated, so for example if you upload a file you'd still have to go in and fill out the metaobject.
To keep things bite sized for management using multiple pages for each part of a bigger resource page is another method though will need theme customizations for the automatic stitching part.
Url structure
If the above example url is yours keep in mind you cannot create actual arbitrary url paths on shopify i.e. so no myshopify.com/freedownloads it would have to be myshopify.com/pages/freedownloads, or /products/.., or /blogs/.. or /collections/.. .
Though you can create redirects to keep using /freedownloads but it points to /pages/freedownloads. There are tools for creating redirects in bulk.
The new metaobjects system also has a thing where it auto generates pages for entries.
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/custom-data/metaobjects/webpages
Display
Most all ways to try and automate the assembly of everything to a single shopify page will probably take several advanced theme customizations.
Getting to this part and figuring out how to sanely reassemble all this in some sort of automatic way for a single endpoint may not be apparent until after the first time you've built it as then all the actual requirements and problems are better known.
It's also much more complicated to put all the resources on shopify but then try to display them on a completely different system in any type of automatic way.
Some OS2.0 themes might have sections/blocks that let you do something like assign a page to pull in content into another page; which can be useful if you've made things in smaller page parts. Most all OS2.0 themes let you use custom-liquid sections|blocks where you can hard code references i.e. {{pages['poster'].content}} letting you stitch together multiple pages through the theme system.
Another manual method is the chore of adding everything to a navigation menu as links.
That could also then be used in liquid to build the aggregate resource page.
However this way can easily get forgotten every time a new file/content is added somewhere.
Good Hunting.
