products having attributes w many possible values

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13 years 6 months ago #31376

I'm testing out HikaShop on top of Joomla 1.7 in an test for an alcohol storefront. There's a pretty wide possible range of product types, vendors, vintage, varieties within a single product name as well as product lines, reviewer and tasting notes, etc., etc.

I'd be the first to say that I'm new at HikaShop, so if I missed something obvious please let me know. HS seems to be well-thought of and there's obviously tons of work into it, so kudos at least for that.


Apparently it's problematic to have various attributes and implement them in characteristics - alas, already ran into this one.) Custom fields are only in the pay version, which I'm not against buying, but am before seeing if I can implement my solution. Is the recommended way then to overload characteristics, or are there problems there as well? It seems a bit impractical to create hundreds of characteristics for types of alcohols (people are inventive when it comes to drinking ; )), another few hundred for vintages (you have to go back to about 1800 for the older madeiras, for instance), etc., etc. If I could automate this it wouldn't be as bad, perhaps, but as I understand it when importing from CSV HS will auto-create categories, not characteristics or custom fields.

Without condemnation there does seem to be a lot of additional complexity getting tacked on (now there are several more types of attributes to keep track of - for products there are categories, related products, characteristics, options, of which only categories seem to be usable by the rest of Joomla? There may well be more, I just got started!), but perhaps there are reasons for all this... but on my side the added complexity is not helping me solve my problem easily.

So... any advice on how to tackle my initial issue with lots of attributes? Is there any light at the end of the current HS roadmap? It'd be great to have some lightweight attribute solution that I could use with the rest of Joomla and be able to use even simple filters on (e.g. vintage > 20 years ago) without having to drop into PHP.



Finally, a small bit of feedback - on your (pretty darn good) documentation :

1) having a section that went over the the differences between the four product attribute types and best practices on how to use them and what they're good would be really great to have, and would probably save folks a bunch of time (as well as less time answering such questions on the forum ; ))

2) having all the docs bundled into one big PDF would also rock for ease of searching

3) you don't have any apparent way to search the docs - you come so so close in the Integrated Documentation area - add in a word filter! : ), but even your basic search box can't choose the documentation only to search through for some reason, although it gives sections, categories (not even sure what section/cat you're talking about there), etc. as options.) Plus it seems pretty random in its results order, not giving precedence to words found in section titles (try searching for "cron" as an example of how it doesn't see the "Cron Task" section until the 57th out of 59 hits.)

Sorry for the length, and thanks again.


p.s. Think you have a bug in your search box text - the text next to the first box is "?�????????", it looks like that's area_plug_kunenasearch...? See a search result at the top of the page for an example.

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13 years 6 months ago #31398

Hi,

Custom fields are not there to overload characteristics. It's just something else.
Each type of "attribute" works differently in order to allow store owners to do what they want. The correct tool for the job... Custom fields are great to ask the user to enter information about a product he wants to buy. Characteristics are great to be able to have different information/image/prices/stock for each variant of the product (it works great for clothes where your real goods have a size and a color because you want to handle the stock of each variant, not the global stock of the product). Options are there for when you want to add other products to one product purchase or as a configurator (used for example for computers sales).

So really the question is not what to use but what kind of attributes do you need ?
If you just want to add information to your products in the backend so that you can display it on the product page and use it for filters, I would recommend to create custom fields of the table "product".
If you want to have your users enter information or choose something for their purchases and that it doesn't influence the prices, custom fields of the table "item" are the way to go.
If you want to have the price of the product or the stock changed based on the selection of the user, characteristics should be used.
If you want to have other products selectable on the product page and that the price of the main product and the price of the options get added together, then you should use options.
If you want to cross sell products, you can setup related products.
If you want a way to navigate through products hierarchically on your front end, you could create several category trees and add several categories to your products so that the users can easily reach your products based on the criteria they need without using a search box.

Thank you for your feedback on the documentation. Making a big PDF is not easy since the documentation spans over more than a hundred articles. And working on the doc takes time that we don't spend improving HikaShop but we already have a lot of infos in the documentation. We'll continue improving it and take into account your remarks thanks.
If I search for cron on the page www.hikashop.com/support/documentation/i...ntation.html?lang=en I get only one result which is the article on the cron setup, so that seems pretty good to me.
The search system is the default search included in Joomla and I must say we didn't look at using anything else. It's not perfect but it works out of the box and it's better than nothing. If you have recommendations about something better, we can look at changing it :)

Thank you for the feedback on the strange characters in the search. I don't know why but it was indeed the kunena plugin doing that. I've fixed it.

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13 years 6 months ago #31399

Hi,

Custom fields are not there to overload characteristics. It's just something else.
Each type of "attribute" works differently in order to allow store owners to do what they want. The correct tool for the job... Custom fields are great to ask the user to enter information about a product he wants to buy. Characteristics are great to be able to have different information/image/prices/stock for each variant of the product (it works great for clothes where your real goods have a size and a color because you want to handle the stock of each variant, not the global stock of the product). Options are there for when you want to add other products to one product purchase or as a configurator (used for example for computers sales).

So really the question is not what to use but what kind of attributes do you need ?
If you just want to add information to your products in the backend so that you can display it on the product page and use it for filters, I would recommend to create custom fields of the table "product".
If you want to have your users enter information or choose something for their purchases and that it doesn't influence the prices, custom fields of the table "item" are the way to go.
If you want to have the price of the product or the stock changed based on the selection of the user, characteristics should be used.
If you want to have other products selectable on the product page and that the price of the main product and the price of the options get added together, then you should use options.
If you want to cross sell products, you can setup related products.
If you want a way to navigate through products hierarchically on your front end, you could create several category trees and add several categories to your products so that the users can easily reach your products based on the criteria they need without using a search box.

Thank you for your feedback on the documentation. Making a big PDF is not easy since the documentation spans over more than a hundred articles. And working on the doc takes time that we don't spend improving HikaShop but we already have a lot of infos in the documentation. We'll continue improving it and take into account your remarks thanks.
If I search for cron on the page www.hikashop.com/support/documentation/i...ntation.html?lang=en I get only one result which is the article on the cron setup, so that seems pretty good to me.
The search system is the default search included in Joomla and I must say we didn't look at using anything else. It's not perfect but it works out of the box and it's better than nothing. If you have recommendations about something better, we can look at changing it :)

Thank you for the feedback on the strange characters in the search. I don't know why but it was indeed the kunena plugin doing that. I've fixed it.

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13 years 4 months ago #37141

zenfish wrote:

3) you don't have any apparent way to search the docs - you come so so close in the Integrated Documentation area - add in a word filter! : ), but even your basic search box can't choose the documentation only to search through for some reason, although it gives sections, categories (not even sure what section/cat you're talking about there), etc. as options.) Plus it seems pretty random in its results order, not giving precedence to words found in section titles (try searching for "cron" as an example of how it doesn't see the "Cron Task" section until the 57th out of 59 hits.)


Yes, really good documentation :cheer: however the search function is pretty useless. It does take quite a while to try and find things in the documentation, as when you search for something, say discounts, it does not return a result of the discounts documenation page.

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13 years 4 months ago #37266

We're using the search system of joomla for that. We didn't find a good solution other than that for now. If you have ideas, don't hesitate :)

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13 years 4 months ago #37297

just goes to show how useless the default joomla article search function is then :blink:

Last edit: 13 years 4 months ago by woonydanny.

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