Software for displaying small inventory on the web

September 14, 2006 10:25 AM

I need recommendations for software for displaying a small inventory on the web?

I'm doing a web site for a friend who buys and resells heavy equipment (commercial trucks, forklifts, etc.). He maintains an inventory of 20-100 items at a time, divided into about 5 categories. He wants a web page for each category that displays info about each item in that category, along with one or more photos of each.

The business owner, who is not particularly technically inclined, needs to manage the addition and removal of items himself.

I'm currently working on an implementation of this using MovableType, and it satisfies the requirements pretty well.

But I got to thinking: if all you have is a blogging tool, does every project resemble a blog? Is there some category of web software out there that is specifically designed for something like this?

I'm a moderate level programmer, with experience in PHP and Perl, so tweaking some packaged scripts wouldn't be an issue.

It's okay if the software uses MySQL.

posted by tippiedog to computers & internet (3 answers total)

Wow, clear case for Shopify. Terribly easy web-store software. The only thing that may turn him off is that it's hosted, so no local copy for you!
posted by Imperfect at 11:01 AM on September 14, 2006

I forgot to mention that I do NOT need eCommerce functionality. This guy does actual deals in person. Does that still make shopify a good candidate? I'll check it out.
posted by tippiedog at 11:46 AM on September 14, 2006

I'm partial to Drupal, and since you know PHP you might like it too. It's probably more flexible than Movable Type, but the learning curve might be a little steeper.

Making stuff look like a catalog and not like a blog is mostly a matter of changing the template to reflect that.
posted by RobotHero at 5:15 PM on September 14, 2006