Hi,
If the intended use of "manufacturer" was to be replaced by a custom field in such scenarios, then by that logic — why was the "manufacturer" system created in the first place? After all, someone could always just add a dropdown field called "brand" and use that.
Indeed, someone could just add a dropdown field called brand if the sole purpose is to have the selection in the dropdown displayed on the product page and use it for a filter.
The brand feature adds the capability to display a listing of the brands on the frontend, and be able to link the selected brand on the product page to the listing of products of that brand, which you can't do with just a custom field.
What you're asking is similar to asking us to add extra options to be able to display a product without add to cart button, quantity, image, etc, with just the product description, to have a rendering of the product page similar to a Joomla article. And in such case, I would tell you to just use a Joomla article, even if it's for displaying the description of a product.
This would make the feature more robust and usable in more complex setups — especially in large-scale stores.
I think it is totally ok to use a custom product field for these "more complex setups" and forgo the use of the "brand" option in such a case.
The manufacturer field is a core feature in HikaShop, and it's very useful — it links directly to the product, is searchable, integrates well with filtering, and even has a dedicated UI. That's why we're using it.
A custom product field also links directly to the product, is searchable, integrates well with filtering and has a dedicated UI.
I still don't see a reason to not wanting to use a custom product field in your case, besides the fact that "there is already a field called 'brand' in the product edit interface".
Now, on top of this, let's talk about your 2 requests:
allow manufacturers linked to products to still appear in filters even if unpublished,
I'm not confortable with this change. First, conceptually, displaying something on the frontend when it has been unpublished by the administrator is not something which should happen normally.
Also, if you unpublish a product, you don't want it to appear on a products listing on the frontend. So, in order to keep consistency with this, I believe that it should be the same for brands, categories, etc.
Third, if we were to change it, someone updating his HikaShop while having unpublished brands and a filter on brands would then get his unpublished brands added to his brand filter on the frontend, and that's probably something he didn't want.
Fourth, it would be inconsistent with the display of the brand on the product details page. At the moment, the brand only appears on the product details page of a product if the brand is published. I think it makes sense that a filter on brands follow the same rule.
Now, there is always the possibility to customize HikaShop to do it. With a class override of the filter class, you can extend the function getCategories in order to remove the published filter:
www.hikashop.com/support/documentation/6...ntation.html#classes
That's not too difficult if you're a developer so it's possible.
and optionally suppress their automatic listing pages if not needed.
You could make an override of category / listing via the menu Display>Views and add a bit of PHP code to check the current element so that if it is a brand, you return a 404 HTTP error.
This sounds like a really niche capability that only you need for a really specific use case. Usually, in such case, we recommend making a view override to handle it because HikaShop already has too many options everywhere.
I hope you can understand my point of view on the matter. I could have just said "thank you for your feedback" and ignore your request. But I feel that simply using a custom product field would be way better than what you're looking into and that's why I wanted to explain to you my thought process on this.