Product catalog without e-commerce

[ergophobe]

I'm looking for a simple online catalog that doesn't need to have a shopping cart or sell things.

This is for a friend (who pays well when he needs work, so no issues with that - but a friend first) who is a collector. He wants to display his collection and he wants it searchable by various different characteristics.

He has no intention of selling these things. I've done three e-comm sites for him, so if he wanted to sell stuff, he would say so. E-comm just makes things complicated and he hates that.

So I'm looking for something that would replicate a gallery catalog, and archive listing, a product catalog with excellent faceted search.

Anyone have something like that they use and like? The simpler, lighter the better.

[ergophobe]

This looks promising
https://omeka.org/classic/showcase/

[littleman]

That looks good.   There might be a slick way to do this in wordpress too.

Edit, I found this:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-create-a-product-catalog-in-wordpress-without-a-shopping-cart/

[Chunkford]

You can do it with Woocommerce but with plugins - https://businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-how-to-enable-catalog-mode/

[Drastic]

How many products?

[ergophobe]

Thanks for the suggestions!

>>woocommerce
>>I found this:

I could go that route (both woocommerce). The thought crossed my mind. I only ever tried to build something with it once and was not a big fan, but at least it has the full backing of automattic, so it should be supported long term

How many products?

I should have said "items" but that didn't make sense in a subject line. None of these will be for sale. He's a collector. He recently got out of one type of collecting where he had one of the best collections in the world (obscure niche) and sold it as a single big lot to an auction house. So there are no "products" per se, but it could be a few thousand items. That's what the last collection grew too.

[Leona]

I am surprised you are not a fan, woocommerce is here to stay so don't worry about that. I would imagine this would be the quickest way to build with a catalogue plugin as you can upload via csv and create the attributes for filtering products and product search. There is also a custom product page builder plugin if you wanted to change the way it looks and you also have the ability to add related products and even (with a plugin) an amazon type..people who saw this also looked at.. type of functionality.

Plus there are a crap load of templates to choose from that work with it out of the box.

[ergophobe]

I think Woo is great for a standard store application. Selling blankets and pillows or tonneau covers or iPhone cases. Sure. Great.

I have tried a Woo add-on for lodging and it was a pretty bad user experience.

And in this case, where there's no e-comm aspect and the product descriptions will be really complex, I think Woo has a lot of complexity he doesn't need and a lot of simplicity where he needs some more features.

In the end, he likes that archive/museum catalog that I found.

[Drastic]

I've seen custom themes that had a products list on the back end/admin area and the theme made each product a dynamic page on the front end. Kind of like ecomm without the ecomm part, but usually for a small number of items. I'm not sure it would scale to thousands. Weird setups too and I don't know if you could find something like that off the shelf.

[ergophobe]

We'll be going with Omeka. It's nice and just what we need.