UI disaster and obvious rescue way.

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1

Hi there! I am the owner of website topclass-asia.com on Wix.
We are the property and tourism company in Thailand and we listing our objects and serveces via dynamic pages. And I have A HUGE problem with this… I mean, Wix has.

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Look at my Item Page, namely at the left side, where you can see… the gallery? No. This is just ten separate images, each of which is connected to it’s own database field with “Image Source” data type.

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And this is the part of my database that provides my “gallery” showing different images for different items. Yet as you may guess, it is very inconvinient because

  1. I have to place image one by one in each cell
  2. I have limited quantity of images, same for each Item Page
  3. If I want to set different alt-text, pop-up hint and link for each image, i need 30 extra fields.
  4. When user clicks the photo on website and opens it full-size, there is no chance to see next photo without closing previous

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This 4-th issue I call UI disaster . Because I don’t know about all people, but I’m not going to stay on the website where developer must provide cozy photo viewer for my kind choise about purchase, but there is no cozy photo viewer here. And everything is much more bad. When user clicks this X in top-right corner, the page automatically scrolls up! So now user have to scroll the page down again and click on the next photo, then close it and scroll down and click to the next photo, then… and then… and no more this user in my website never.

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Let’s go further. If you read this post on desktop, open this link https://goo.gl/UDe9iT on mobile and look how awful it looks like. I have to distribute my separate-limited-quantity-non-slideable-scrolling-page-up photos-with-same-alt-text-and-pop-up-hints-on-each in whole page space to make it readable.

Now you can ask me: “Why don’t you just place slider or panoramic gallery instead of all that ugly perfomance?”

Don’t think that I didn’t try. The matter is that when you place slider or gallery on Title Page, it allows to set up one field of DB as an image source. And each item gets this image from one cell of this field. So on each Item Page I have the gallery with one image only in any case. This method works on non-dynamic pages (and on Category Pages) when the page is not depend of item row and the gallery reads all column from up to down.

So now I have some questions to Wix Developers.

  1. Why your DB has no option to add array of images in the cell?
  2. Improving the issue straight above - why your DB has no option to add associative array for galleries with 4 columns (source, alt-text, pop-up hint and link)? Or any associative arrays with custom settings?
  3. I am not a coder, but as I’ve understood, arrays as field data type is the only way to place dynamic galleries on dynamic pages. Have you some other advices for me?
  4. As I (not a coder) have understood, I can’t add or change data types in my database, c’z they are provided by Wix developers only. At the same time the work with arrays is provided by any good web drive. Is this option in your closest to-do list?

When I asked this long question in Wix Support, they gave me very short answer to go to this forum. As we have a deal with serious problem, that really makes poor the functional of dynamic item pages, I wait for answer of Wix Code team very much.

2

Maybe somebody can help me at least with code to make this arrows < > in photo view mode. I mean make separate photos to interact like gallery?

3

Think I must sometimes push this topic up until Wix developers see it

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I contacted support in facebook and got an answer that coders team is going to read it and answer me. Still waiting from march 7

5

Hi Constantine,

you have raised many issues, so lets please start with the multi reference. this is what we call master-details, meaning for example single hotel with a few room types

what you need to do is create a collection of hotels and a collection of room types. the collection of rooms also references the hotel it belongs to, so in a single dynamic page you can add many details of contained objects
having a new data type of array is also on our roadmap (but for different functionality), i think that master-details is what you are looking for. you can also try to create a gallery of the details in the ‘master’ dynamic page that will result in what you are looking for

Shlomi

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Real lifehack, thank you, Shlomi. But imagine that I have more then 100 property objects. Or… why me? Let’s take a blogger who makes an article every day with 5-10 photos. Just 3 months and this blogger will have 500-1000 rows database. And he still can’t use multiple select of images. And the time is going on and on. Arrays in cells could be much better IMHO.

Ok… Maybe you can also give me a link that will help me to create simple user filter to choose content on category page in depend of certain cell content (with radio buttons etc?)

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Hi Constantine,

indeed the are lots of similar use cases, store with lots of products, course with many students, hotel with lots of rooms etc.
the question to ask here is if the contained objects (products, students, rooms) also have a place of their own, to be searched, modified etc. do they have their schema (contains properties of their own), do they have reference to other collections, and if a student can also be registered to many coursed (a.k.a many-to-many Many-to-many (data model) - Wikipedia)

can you please, what search / filter you are building. maybe a screenshot or example from other site as reference?

thanks,
Shlomi