For users of the TourCMS tour operator ecommerce platform

Widget tour order (+idea?)

Hi Guys,

Just a quick question re widgets.

Take a look at this: http://www.wineroutetours.co.uk/argentina_chile.php

If I remember rightly the widget that appears here was set up using the keyword "Argentina" - so it may be a bad example as all of our tours here have the word Argentina in them.

What would be nice is if instead of / as well as using keywords to add tours that you could select the tours you want to include in a particular widget & that they would appear in the selected order.

Am I right in saying that if I now added another tour with "Argentina" in it - it would appear in this widget?

Also re tour order within the widget - is the only way to order these the "display order" in tour setup? - If so - what happens If I decide to order my tours in price order & subsequently added a lower priced tour - would I have to go back into each tour and change this?

I think that's it.

All the best

Aled

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Paul on April 19, 2011 at 9:20am

Hi Aled,

You can use our bookmarklet to take a look at the settings on a widget (easier than viewing source or looking at the widget code). Using the bookmarklet on your page gives this:

From that I can see it will just return all Tours on the Channel with ID 628 (Tango Tours), if there were any filters/restrictions (such as by country/keyword) those would show up under qs:

Now as for restricting which Tours show up in the widget, the first restriction level is that it's only listing Tours you have set up for Marketplace on that channel. You can (using the Widget wizard) further filter by Keyword, Country, Location text, proximity to a point, whether they include/exclude accommodation etc.

As for sorting, the widgets actually use the Tour Search API behind the scenes so it's technically possible to build a widget that supports any features of that API. Currently they will be sorted alphabetically, unless a commercial priority is set. We don't currently support sorting by price, as widgets work accross suppliers and could contain multiple currencies that gets quite messy - however maybe that's something we can do, if all one currency, we will need to get back to you on that.

Generally the idea behind the widgets are that they are "set and forget", so rather than specifying a list of Tour IDs we hope that we have enough flexibility in the filtering options. Would any of the items in the Querystring Parameters table on the Tour Search API help you to filter out just the Tours you wanted? We can help you build a widget using those if so.