Question

I would like to create a list of products and sort them by selecting different filter options on the menu like the one here: http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=124&IsSingle=1&Category=24&name=Network-Storage-NAS

How hard would it be to program this using php and javascript?

Answer 1

It can be a bit complex to discuss how to design a system like that but this is easily accomplished with ORDER BY in PHP and MySQL:

$order = $_GET['order'];
if ($order)
{
    switch ($order)
    {
        case 'p':
            $order = 'price';
            break;

        case 'n':
            $order = 'name';
            break;

        case 'r':
            $order = 'rating';
            break;

        default:
            $order = 'price';
            break;
    }
}

$Sql = "SELECT product_name, price, rating FROM products ORDER BY $order ASC";
// do your SQL stuff here

On HTML and Javascript you can do something like:

<select name="filter" onchange="window.location.href='filter.php?order='+this.value">
    <option value="p">Price</option>
    <option value="n">Name</option>
    <option value="r">Rating</option>
</select>

Just an idea but this can be improved to much much better approach.