Control Order Shop Products are Displayed?

I installed Husseins app and loved the features, however I think having two ways to edit products in the admin area would be a little confusing for some editors. Especially as some of the product breadcrumbs take you out of the app and back into the perch standard product editor.

Is it possible to use the pipit app exclusively (hide the perch standard product stuff)?

A small problem that has been overcome:

Other admin templates within the site such as the brands and options editors had links pointing back to the standard products view - this would cause confusion for my clients to have 2 product manager screens.

With a little fiddling in the menu manager settings and a few mods to php navigation files within the shop I have the admin only showing the pipit_catalog view for managing products no matter link the user clicks on.

• In Settings > menu manager You have to make the Products link inactive (it cannot be deleted, understandable)

• Rename 'Catalog' to 'Products' in the menu manager - this brings consistency of naming for other templates (Brands, Options etc).

• In /perch/addons/apps/perch_shop_products/modes/_subnav.php change line 5 from 'perch_shop_products' to 'pipit_catalog' - only change name 5. Do not change the other lines - this will break products sub editors (variants, files etc)

• Comment out lines 10-15 in /perch/addons/apps/pipit_catalog/modes/_subnav.php - these linked back to the non pipit products view.

With those changes the admin area is set to always show the pipit_catalog app no matter what 'Products' link is clicked.

So far everything seems to work OK.

Is it possible to use the pipit app exclusively (hide the perch standard product stuff)?

I don't think you can have a completely seamless experience with the Catalog app alone.

The 'Add a Product' button at the top, for instance, takes you to the Product edit form which is within the official app. When you successfully add a product the success message at the top includes a link to the default listing.

Also deleting a product through the Catalog app takes the user to the default listing. Basically all the editing is done through the official app and I'm not attempting to change its behaviour or handle it through the Catalog app.

So I think the person who manages the shop needs to be aware of this.

If you are using Runway, you can use the Menu Manager like Drew suggested.

I purposely included a link to the default product listing on the Catalog app's sidebar menu so you can hide 'Products' from your main menu, but still can access it through the Catalog app.

I like to hide all the Shop apps from the main 'My Site' menu and add a separate section for them. Here's an example.

Thanks Hussein, I understand the approach.

I reluctantly edited the files within the shop as I'm aware this could break in future updates. I've left a breadcrumb trail if I need to revert.

The filtering and search of the product list is so much better than the stock app (no offence Drew) - I thought it was worth the risk.

Plus the manual control of the order the products are displayed front end is something we have been asked for on a few projects now.

The filtering and search of the product list is so much better than the stock app

These features may eventually come to the Shop app, but that's not for me to comment on. I hope they do. At least in the meantime there's a 3rd-party option that does the job.

The Shop app is free and it's not a small app by any means. You can view its roadmap on Trello and vote for the features you would like to see get implemented: https://trello.com/b/PHAhH0CE/perch-shop-roadmap

By the way, you can also sponsor features: https://shop.perchcms.com/roadmap/#page-sponsor

Sponsoring is good to know. I wasn't aware of that, that adds a dimension of security against non-standard client feature requests.

I wasn't being hard on Perch Shop, it's just part of the process of getting something as close to perfect as possible.