Problem attaching Ubercart view to relevant content

Question

Example page: http://giantcalculator.com/content/cartridge-filters

It’s very cumbersome to connect the ubercart view to a relevant content page. In the example above I have attached the view to the bottom; you can scroll down to see it. It is a tedius process though in which I have to create the view, then create a mini panel, include the view in the mini panel, then go to blocks page and add the mini panel to region (currently a region below the main content), then I have to configure the block so the view only appears on it’s one particular page.

This seems far too complicated and the particular region will soon have about 20 blocks inside it, though each only appearing on one page. Is there a better way to attach a view to its relevant content info, or vice versa?

I know the view creates a page of its own, and if I could add the content on top of the view that would be great. Or within the view itself, can the content be added somehow?

I'm almost ready to move forward with this site but I really need to find if there is a better method first. I'm posting this in a number of places and offering a $20 bounty via paypal to the first responder with best alternative that I end up using. (if there is one). Bounty may be shared if two or more people have the same response on different forums and I can't tell who was first, though when I do have an answer I'll promptly post it.

Other forums this will post include Drupal.org paid forum, Ubercart Bounty forum, aardvark, superuser and stackoverflow.

Answer 1

If I understand correctly, I think the piece of the puzzle you're missing is Views arguments. If you ever find yourself creating more than one view, where the only difference is the content (ie. based on taxonomy, or a certain CCK field), you probably want to use that as an argument in the view so it loads the correct content automatically.

I assume "cartridge filters" is a taxonomy term, and the page linked above is a node with this term applied. So you'd add a taxonomy arg to your view in the Views admin, and get it to pull the term from the current node. There are a bunch of tutorials out there on this, and here's a screencast: http://gotdrupal.com/videos/drupal-views-arguments

I'm also not sure why you're using mini panels. They're generally used for sets of blocks or other content to be displayed repeatedly, like a tabbed block or footer. It sounds like you just want a regular block display of the aforementioned view. You could also make this entire page a Panel.