Can this be done?

[MITK]

Theme: Dawn 15.4.0

I’m wondering if this can be done? The person that I have hired has been missing in action for a little while so I’m trying to figure this out or possibly pay someone for hourly work to give me some directions.

What I want to do is on the pre designed phone case page on the left hand side I’d like to list all the categories First question is can I do that automatically or do I have to manually enter it Ideally automatically would be better so that if I ever added a category it would populate.

The second thing is on the right side or in the middle of the screen I would like to display 3 or 4 Designs randomly and allow the user to cycle through them right there …. So if he wanted to look at the next 4 designs he or she could like a button or slide it to the left or right.

I have fallen in love with the Globo Product options App and hopefully will be using that.

Then when the user clicks on the image of the design they like they will see something like this which i already have setup.

Basically I think I’ve got all the ingredients for a really good Stew Now I just need someone to help guide me on how to cook this sob.

[tim_tairli]

It is possible.

However.

Try to think in Shopify terms.

Do you want this on the product page? Or it’s a different page?
What’s categories? Collections to which this product belongs?
Or it’s a collection and “sub-collections” approach?

This would make it easier to understand the relations between all elements of the page and how these can be linked together automatically.

And of course, this would be a custom setup.

[user3489]

@MITK

Basically I think I’ve got all the ingredients for a really good Stew Now I just need someone to help guide me on how to cook this sob.

The easiest automatic method: use product tags and loop them with Liquid.

[PaulNewton]

Hi @MITK I’m @PaulNewton shopify-partner I do theme customizations like this.

Every thing as described is possible but the amount of topics glommed in and the amount of business logic someone needs to extract from you is on the high side so it is beyond the scope of the forums to teach how to build it all.

The sidebar can be a curated/automated list often needs to either be a theme setting, or a menu, and clear logic ; there has to be some sort of information architecture otherwise it’s just dumping every collection there making an unorganized list.

Themes , liquid templates, don’t really do “random”, so any randomization has to be pseudo-random done via the frontend. But sliders can be simple enough you can probably burn your time asking the sidekick AI assistant to generate such a section; though it might not pull directly from the current collection/filters without advanced work.

Depending on depth of configuration needed product-personalization apps like the one in the third screenshot can also be replaced with a one time theme customization instead of a monthly paid app. Especially now with 2k+ variants generally available.

If there’s an actual budget behind this you can reach out to me for customization services.
CLICK my profile-pic or visit my profile on the forums
ALWAYS include context in new communications, e.g. reference urls, posts urls, etc

[MITK]

@tim_tairli

It is possible.

However.

Try to think in Shopify terms.

Do you want this on the product page? Or it’s a different page?
What’s categories? Collections to which this product belongs?
Or it’s a collection and “sub-collections” approach?

This would make it easier to understand the relations between all elements of the page and how these can be linked together automatically.

And of course, this would be a custom setup.

@tim_tairli Thank you for the response.

What I am trying to do on that page I drew up in the picture above( i will add it again in this post) with red boxes. Basically I’m looking to list all the collections on the left and then I would like to have those collections seeing maybe 3 or 4 different designs or random designs for that category.

The page i wanted to list the collections and display the phone cases collections/pre-design-phone-case

My kids have Designed phone case have a little bit of flair with them so all the collections are the designs There’s about 300 to 400 designs and then maybe 60 different cell phone products (Apple, Samsung and Google)

I wasn’t aware we could create a sub collection, If I can then I could organize everything a little bit better because I didn’t think I had that option I went with generalization of the collection details for instance holidays and seasonal I have phone cases for Christmas I have phone cases Halloween et cetera et cetera but if I can do subcategories That would make my life a whole lot easier. I’ll have to research that.

As you can see from the image I posted above it shows the design of the phone and then gets the person to select the type of brand they want to have designed So I mean the big thing here is all the designs which is why I set them up in collections so that hopefully I can categorize them.

As for what collections I have currently:

• Aesthetic and creative

  hobbies

  relationship

  animals

  personalization

  holidays and seasonal

  fandom and pop culture

  cute and fun

  sassy and bold

  travel

  fitness motivation

I think i answered all your questions…

[tim_tairli]

Sorry for giving you false hopes – no, there is no such thing a sub-collection in Shopify – all collections are equal.

You can, however, create your own structure, by using say, menus, or metafields.
Say, one way to approach this is to have, for example, automatic collection with rule Vendor='Apple'.

Then you can have a “sub-collection” (note the quotes I use!) by using condition .
Vendor='Apple' and Type='case'.

To create a structure, you can have a List of Collections metafield on parent which will include references to child collection(s).

But there are other ways to approach it.

What you’re imagining can be a collection page where you can have these “sub-collections” listed on the left and on the right have these collections showcase their products in the carousels. So that each line is kind of a “Featured collection” section.

But again – the important part is not implementation, but how all these things are interlinked: what data you need to assign on each of them to make it work.

Say, if you have a handful of “main collections” you can configure these pages as templates, simply in “Edit theme”. With newer themes like Horizon, you can probably even do this without theme code edits.

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Do not forget to think through how this should look/work on mobile. For your niche this can be a prevalent browsing device and you do not want to make it difficult for your visitors to navigate.

Have a good ride over your competitor websites (especially if they are successful and Shopify-based) – see how they approach it, what can be improved, etc.

If you have links to these pages it will help you shape your target (especially while speaking with dev).

What I am saying is – there is no fully-automated built-in functionality for this, most likely you’d need to hire a dev to implement and you should discuss the details with the dev.

[MITK]

Thanks for your feedback and help

[Ellis01]

Create a menu and display it using a small Custom Liquid snippet so it updates automatically whenever you add or remove categories.