Number of Categories & Subcategories

Submitted by Sam Ruffalo on January 19, 2008 - 8:08am

Hi Sam,

First, please confirm that my Front Page (uses HTML of coure)will work just fine with XLEcom. I like HTML because I know very little about PHP.

About the Maximum number of pages allowed: I read in your forum that 65,000 lines are the maximum allowed. I'm not sure about this relationship. Therefore, if my site will have 35 categories, with 8 of these categories having 0 subcategories but 5 or 6 products in each category, and the remaining 27 categories have 3 to 28 subcategories with each subcategory having an average of 8 products per subcategory, while some of the subcategories have 3 or 4 products, and other subcategories have 12, and 4 subcategories have 27 products each, will XLE handle this number? Or should I use 2, 3, or 4 websites to be able to use XLE?

Your advice on this subject is appreciated.

Sam Ruffalo

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RE: Number of Categories & Subcategories

Submitted by Sam Raheb on January 20, 2008 - 2:24pm.

The best thing to do is experiment with the Shareware version. It is exactly the same as the registered version except for the following:

All prices shown on the Published HTML web pages and to the Home Page Design Preview will be modified slightlyy from the actual values contained within the product database. The actual values within the product database will not be changed. This way you can republish the web pages using the actual values from the product database if you later decide to purchase and register the program. Also, a branding statement will be added to the bottom of each published Product Ad. This program will occasionally prompt the user to register the program. Upon registration, the prompts will be removed.

Category Levels
XLEcom currently supports two category levels, the Main category and sub-category levels. Therefore, you must be able to organize your products to work within these parameters.

As stated in the Program's help:

Number of Product Ads per Sub Category / Page
Keep in mind that each sub category results in one published HTML product page. Therefore you need to consider the following:

(1) The more products / page, the longer the page will take to download. Be aware of your visitor's download speed if they are viewing your website via a telephone dial-up connection. It is also advisable to check the Published HTML file sizes to see if they are all within a reasonable size for downloading.

(2) How big of a list of products do you want to make your visitors scroll through on "one" page to find the product they want?" You may want to subdivide these products into additional sub categories to lower the number of products per page. Try not to place more that 30 products per sub category.

Warning: The largest single HTML file that Excel can publish can only contain a maximum of 65,536 lines. This maximum limit is reached when there are usually more than 750 products listed in a single sub category. If you exceed this limit, a Publishing error will occur.

Multiple Independent Web Stores
If you feel that your store will be too large for a single store, you can create multiple stores and link them together. See the following page for more information on this topic:

Creating Multiple Independent Web Stores

Sam Raheb
XLEcom Program Developer