Hello,
Long time lurker and Magento hack, have been grateful to these forums on many occasions. So first up thankyou to the countless hours of frustration you have helped me overcome and or avoid on my long and "interesting" Magento journey.
I run a car performance tuning site, and have need for what is to me essentially a Microsoft Access database lookup function. I have spent weeks trying to first work out what to ask, and then to try and narrow down some options available, so please forgive my ignorance. I have even gone down the road of jquery, seems this is the answer, but Javascript is still beyond me. What I really need is advice in the direction to head more than anything, for I don't know what I don't know kind of thing.
I basically want to be able to output a cars power improvement figures after a customer selects their particular model. I have large excel databases of power figures before and after tuning, and would prefer to use this as an external database dynamically linked to selection and output fields. All my competitors use a simple "make model year" selector, and then output the figures on a standalone page, but this makes for a massive amount of extra pages ( one for every make, model, variant, engine etc etc ). Surely there is a way to have a CSV or similar database linked, looked up, and the figures displayed, much like I used to do back in uni with Microsoft Access, or even Excel.
An example of a "power configurator" is here http://www.tuningdynamics.com.au/ and on inspecting the page source, line 225 is where this starts.
So my question is how have they done this, is it Javascript or something, and most importantly which direction should i head to start working out how to do it myself? If only I could just embed excel or something....
Thank you for any comments in advance, and apologies for my lack of correct terminology / understanding / general Magento wisdom. It's been a love / hate relationship learning Magento from scratch!
cheers,
Greg.
