Re: RFC: Product directory

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 12:33 PM, David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> wrote:

>> price text -- Pricing info (where relevant)
>
> Price is too complicated to model, and suffers from "cache coherency"
> issues. Pointing to a web site, where appropriate, would handle this
> better.

Agreed but a) we already display that data and b) it's useful to give
users a ballpark figure, even if something like "$99.99US as at
15/12/2007"

<snip ddl>

> Products may have more than one category.

We don't currently allow listings in more than one category, and I'm
inclined to continue with that (unwritten) policy - the reason being
that listing in multiple categories will easily bloat the number of
generated pages that a product might be listed in, potentially
affecting search engine rankings. With relatively generic categories I
don't see any real need to allow multiple categories.

> and more than one license.

Again, not sure I see a need. Either it's commercial, OSS, or freeware
- I don't think there's much scope to have more than one (the obvious
exception is something like "$99.99, or free to educational users" but
I'd just class that as commercial). I don't want to list the actual
OSS licence used as folks can decide whether a product meets with
their personal ethics once they visit it's homepage.

> The above schema handles these things. Might we want to break
> "publisher" out into a separate table?

Possibly. Makes the coding & management a little more tricky though.
If we were to do that perhaps it should be part of a larger project to
have a directory of vendors/publishers etc for news, events, services
and products.

--
Dave Page
EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com