Why Isotope Rocks

Wow. I just sat down this morning with what I thought was a day-long task. I have a client who has a list of classes that they sell registrations for over their website using Isotope. They also need to display all those classes on a calendar in a couple different ways along with a matrix of categories as well. Little did I know that doing something like that with Isotope was actually pretty darn easy.

With any other eCommerce/CMS system I can imagine that there would be a lot of work involved here. You'd need logic for creating the calendars themselves, then you would also need the logic to create the matrix for the categories, and then if you wanted to add options in there for sorting, date ranges, etc you're looking at even more code. I tried to picture how you would do this in something like Magento or osCommerce, and it makes me shudder.

But this is why Isotope rocks. By building off of Contao's core Calendar and Event classes, I had all the functionality right at my fingertips. All I did was swap out "events" for "products" by assigning a custom date attribute to the product, add a little custom logic for the category matrix, and there it was... In about 2 hours I had several modules that were perfect to use for displaying event-based products in a variety of ways.

As the project starts to really take shape I am seeing more and more ways that having a flexible, totally integrated, object-oriented eCommerce solution built directly into a powerful CMS is really the way to go. My client is happy, and I have some free time to catch on on things like writing these blog posts :)