Shop-By-Brands for Magento
Thursday, 20 October 2011
An often called feature in Magento is to have a listing of product-manufacturers being displayed on the Magento homepage: This listing is often called Shop By Brands, or Shop By Manufacturers, Brand Navigation, etcetera. Prices for Magento extensions offering this functionality range from free to over 80 Euro. Meet our ByAttribute module which does the same, but much much more.
What is a Shop By Brands listing?
In Magento, every product can have a brand or a manufacturer. But it depends on the shop implementation whether this field is called manufacturer or brand or something else. The reason is that this field is a product attribute, and product attributes can be managed through the Magento backend. So instead of calling this a simple Shop By Brands listing, what you actually want is a listing of all products that have the attribute brand set. It sounds complicated, but this is how programmers work.
Create a listing of any attribute
Instead of focussing on just one attribute that you might or might not have created, our Yireo ByAttribute extension supports all attributes. By editing the XML-layout code in your Magento theme (following our step-by-step documentation) you can create a listing of brands, manufactueres, but also of sizes, colors, and much much more.
Because ByAttribute is so flexible, we have decided to put this functionality mainly in well-thought-of XML-layout-code, so putting things together requires some effort. However, anyone familiar to making minor Magento theming changes will have no problem implementing our module, thanks to the code-comments and the documentation.