Magento pre-order list

Question

I hope that somebody can point me in the right direction or has a ready to go solution, but I'm willing to spend time on this myself, but can't figure out where to start. Lets first start what I want to create.

I use magento, and a custom page create in the backend where I set manually a list with pre-order product, but this is time consuming. All pre-order products are already in one particular category and the all have a attribute that states pre-order yes or no.

I would really like to create a page that can retrieve all pre-order product by the custom attribute, or from the category and create a simpel list in html that gives the user the information of comming pre-orders sorted on the attribute date thats also custom.

So for example a list like

product name | release date | Price (clickable that links to the product)

I use a custom theme currently. Do I start with the page creation from magento, do I start with a custom theme that is a copy of my current theme and select that in the category layout? What is the best way to achieve this wanted behavior?

Hopefully somebody will point me the right direction

Answer 1

There are multiple ways of doing something like this. When developing a solution I try to leverage as much native functionality as possible to reduce the amount of custom work involved.

A possible solution:

• Create a new category Pre-Orders or use existing
• Create new product attribute 'Release Date', add this to the correct attribute set and set the values for the products
• Add all pre-order products to this category
• Create a new template for the category which will pull the data from the products themselves
• Set default template to be the new template for that specific category

The template you will need to create can be created from scratch or you can leverage a page template you already have. Regardless, going forward, all you have to do is make sure the product data is correct and the products are in the correct category.