We've built an application that deals with business management. One of the modules is an inventory/product management for a retail store.
What I want to do is create a user friendly interface that allows them to easily navigate through the categories of item and choose a category or item to edit.
What makes it complicated is that each customer has different level of categories (or none at all).
Here's what my ideas are so far but please if you've seen something like this or have another idea I'd love to hear it.
Idea 1: BreadCrumb Quote:
Display the root products/categories first. Categories would be hyperlink and items not.
Each time they click a category everything under that category would be displayed.
To track where you are i'd add a breadcrumb at the top of the list like so:
main cat > sub cat 3 > package 1 > item
each one would have a check mark next to them so that if they want to "edit" the item or category, they would check mark it and click edit. (or another hyperlink next to it since you can only edit one category at a time, but the checkmark is also useful if they want to delete in bulk)
I'd have a search section at the top so that if you don't want to browse you can just enter the product or category info (name, number, keyword) and it would display matching categories or items) I could even have a flag so that search result only returns categories or only return items depending on what the user is looking for.
By the way, the breadcrumb links would also be links so that you don't have to use the "back" button.
If you like my idea above, let me know on what DHTML funcationalities i could add (with AJAX? ) so that it really gives the user an "application" type / smooth feel rather than it looks like your browsing a website.
It is built with PHP by the way.
Thanks for your feedbacks on this,
Dan
