Product backend Admin screen suggestions

Some thoughts on ways to improve the product admin screen.

(a) Under Main Information / Keywords change the display to organise the products into tabs.

(1) All the default properties except weight / volume in a 'General' tab.
(2) Put weight / volume into a 'Physical' tab.
(3) Put custom product fields into a 'Custom' tab.
(4) As a further refinement add a tab name feature to custom product fields.
That would allow custom product fields to be organised into separate tabs.
(or a custom field to be added to the existing 'Physical' tab.

(b) Reduce the number of fields by being able to hide them at category level.

E.G. If product is in a single category then the 'Files' feature would not show if turned off at the category level. If product in multiple categories then would need to be turned off in all categories.

This would reduce screen clutter by showing only those fields which are relevant.

Hi,

Thank you for the suggestions.

For (a), that's actually what we wanted to avoid. Having all the information in one screen is faster that having to change tabs all the time.

For (b), that's a nice idea. Frankly, it's a nice idea but it's not our priority. We have so many features already in the todo list that aestethic is not our main concern for now. Also, you can always tweak the views of the backend, like the views on the front end to remove the stuff you don't need. We could also add some classes in the view so that you would just have to add a few CSS lines to hide them if you don't need them on a website.

Please avoid tabbing. It drives me crazy in redShop. Hikashop's strength and difference is that all product info is on one page.

Other minor improvements would be:

Larger input box for Category name
Larger input box for Product name
Larger input box for Product url
Larger input box for Product Meta description
Larger input box for Product Keywords

I would also be tempted to make product meta description and keywords textareas so it is easier to see all the data inserted. At the moment when I edit a product I have to scroll backwards and forwards to see what information I have already put in these five fields. It becomes quite tedious.

Thanks

We'll add that to next release. Thanks for your suggestions. You can also edit the files normal of the view product and category and add a size="80" attribute to these input boxes to increase their size in the mean time.

Thanks. I presume being able to copy a product is also in the pipeline?

There is already a copy button available in the listing of products in the business edition of HikaShop.

Will this be ported all to the essential version or will it remain just for the business version?

For now it will remain in the business edition. But nothing is written in stone.

It would be nice to see this incorporated into the Essentials version. The ability to copy a product is not in the Hikashop version comparison features list and having purchased several copies of Essentials already (and more coming), I'm facing the prospect of either having to re-purchase another version or deal with having to re-create similar products from scratch.

The latter is no big deal, but as there is no version upgrade option (from Essentials to Business) it a pretty expensive option for a tiny piece of value.

Also, the ability to buy multiple site licences at a discount would be fabulous!

Just my 2c!

cheers!

Hi,

You can upgrade from Essential to Business on that page:
www.hikashop.com/en/component/hikashop/product/show/cid-3.html

You can contact us for a discount if you buy multiple licenses at once.

I would like to suggest another improvement for the back end:

Some of the pop-up iframes are too small. For examples when managing content menus you can choose the "Parent category" When you click select it opens an iframe. If you have several nested categories every thing on the right is getting squashed. An iframe width of 800 would be much better.

Thanks

We made the width of the popup to fit on small screens so that they can still be closed. Making them bigger will pose problems for users with small screens.
You can however increase their size on your end by editing the view where it can be used and change the default width.
For example, the popup width for the parent category of the menus options is defined in the file form of the view menus that you can edit via the menu Display->Views.
You can search for the code below in the file:
size: {x: 650, y: 375}