waterworks2

Reporting back on this product combination problem in case others have the same questions / problems we had. Unfortunately we decided on using X-Cart all because of the product combination problem we were having with Prestashop. In Xcart, there is an option when setting up or editing a product called "Product Option Groups". It works great. You can read more about it here: Product option groups It's quite simple to use in Xcart. It will allow you to add all of the options for a product as well as what the price effect will be. When a user chooses the variants / options for the product, the price on the screen auto adjusts in real-time. I really want to be using Prestashop though. The backend is so much nicer and overall just a better product I feel...except when it comes to products with lots of variants. We were close to purchasing the Prestashop Module: Attribute Wizard Pro, and giving it a go. But the fine print specifically states "This module requires core code changes" and that really concerned us for future upgrades to our Prestashop store. I have to say though in reading the reviews for the module, it sounds like it has an awesome support team! So good on you guys for such fast responses on support. We might still go this route yet. I will post in the modules forum and request that for the Attributes Wizard Pro, if they could make the pricing update in real-time, that would be an awesome feature for the module, especially for products that have a lot of possible variants that all have an effect on the price of the product. How is the user to know the true price easily without clicking 'add to cart' to see what the total calculated cost is from all the variants / options they selected for the product?

Thanks for the response. I definitely am glad to hear other people's opinions on this. I'm curious how you came up with the 1.1 million combinations? My math isn't so great, but did you just multiply each of the numbers per 'rule of product' method? I should have done that myself. I can certainly understand why the generator could not possibly generate that many combos. Hmm...there must be a better way of doing this. The $150 isn't the deal breaker part of it, but I was really hoping to keep the store free to extra plugins and stuff of that nature. I don't want to clutter the back-end, slow the store down, and create much more to manage in the future. I love the idea of 'ready out of the box' products but I guess I'll have to budget for some extra modules to make things smoother. There must be an alternative method for producing combinations, but I can understand adding an entirely second method of doing things to the core might start bloating it. After giving your idea more thought and banging my head against the monitor a few times, i'm thinking I could knock down the amount of variants by perhaps adding a simple drop-down menu for attributes that have no affect on price. Each of the products is hand-made at the time of order, so there is no 'inventory' per-se to be concerned with when it comes to final product. That should knock down my total combinations to much less, and perhaps doable. So I'd still have maybe 6 attributes Couple values per attribute Then before the price field, somehow add drop-down fields for remaining attributes that don't affect price. Hmmm...how to achieve this now? I will do some research and report back. Wow, thanks for knocking this around with me today. You knocked some sense into me about how else to tackle this.

I completely agree with you Yomas. I also feel Presta is a nice balance between user-friendly and still powerful enough to attract developers, but after discovering this problem has no easy fix other than an expensive module I'll have to maintain every upgrade, I'm going to have to look at other e-commerce platforms.I have less than 50 products total in my whole shop which is why I thought presta would be a great solution. This sucks because I've already put time into building a great looking store for my products. This is just a deal breaker for me for using Prestashop. I will have to look at other options I guess. As far as Magento being the answer, I'm not sure. They have an expensive add-on module that makes combination building much easier too so I'm not sure what the stock version can handle. It's also a beast to use though. Maybe you're an expert dev and would not have any problems working in Magento. It's not something I could consider to be user-friendly.

Hi Dave, thanks for chiming in. Unfortunately the product is such that the product must have these options. Any one of the 11 options could be ordered or not ordered based on the customers desires for that product. I've read on the forum that other guys can generate combinations for products in the 300 value range. That is to say there are 300 possible combinations between the attributes/values. I'm thinking based on my number of values and attributes, I must be in this range for total possible combinations of the product, but it seems to be way too much for the system to handle. I don't think I'm anywhere near the amount of combinations of some guys on here that say they have products with 1000's of variants like ordering a computer system. I think it should be stated in the documentation that the combinations generator has limitations to generating combinations for very simple products with just a few variations.

That's a very interesting work-around. Thanks for posting. I will try it, but oh boy that is going to lead to some problems for me when adding products in the future. Not to mention the trouble of moving the data from offline to online setup. (Cough, cough, ahem.) I really wish the development team would chime in on this. If a module can get it done easily, it seems like this would be a good candidate for something that should work out of the box, non? This might be a deal breaker for me for using PrestaShop as my e-commerce site. I have quite a few products that have enough variations that the combination generator isn't going to be able to produce.

You're right. I tried editing the following two files: ../config/config.inc.php /php.ini I tried 128M, 256M, and 512M. And still, nothing. nada. combination generator still won't work. I am really bummed right now.

I tried adding the following line to /config/config.inc.php ini_set('memory_limit','128M'); but it didn't work. The combination generator is still producing the blank white screen when I add all possible attribute/values needed for the product. How far can I kick up the memory value in that line of code? Also, is it possible I can increase the memory way up to get the combination generator working and then when I'm done, remove the line to return the config.inc.php file back to it's original state, after I've produced the combinations I need for this product? Also, I logged into my cpanel for Bluehost. There is a 'php Config' but under that area, there aren't any options for increasing memory. I noticed a note in this area about the settings that the /public_html/php.ini file is affected. So I opened up that file and found the following line of code: ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (128MB) ; http://php.net/memory-limit memory_limit = 128M

Whoops, I forgot the version. Just installed a fresh copy of the latest 1.5.6.2. I only have installed my theme and now trying to enter my first product. I'm not sure if the price still shows properly in the front-end because I'm still running into the problem of the combinations generator being unable to produce the multiple combos my product needs. Just gives me the blank white screen OOM (out of memory) error, which I detail here: http://www.prestashop.com/forums/topic/306444-combination-generator-not-working/

When using the Combinations Generator, I click the ADD button and then all the combo's pop up on the left with an option to edit the pricing for 'impact on product price'. When I'm editing the text, I noticed some of the pricing jump out to many zeroes after the decimal point, but others stay at two places after the decimal. For instance on of the combos, I entered: 7.00 but the priced jumped to: 7.000000 when clicked on the next pricing field. But then other pricing fields stay at 7.00 when I enter 7.00 for the price. Is this a bug?

Interesting find yomas! Editing core files is definitely above my level of comprehension and something I want to avoid at all costs. I did some digging right now and discovered this thread on problems with combination generator when there are so many possible combinations for a product: http://www.prestashop.com/forums/topic/255253-trouble-with-adding-a-product-that-has-multiple-combinations-combination-generator-fails-to-finish/ This thread talks about the same problem and offers a link to a solution via module, but it's an expensive $150 module that I am really hoping to avoid: http://www.prestashop.com/forums/topic/302348-product-with-thousands-of-combinations/?hl=%2Bproduct+%2Bcombination+%2Bgenerator and then i found this link too: http://forge.prestashop.com/browse/PSCFV-6488 Thanks again for your detailed response. I'm going to explore these threads right now including your solution and see if I can't get this working. I really don't want to pay for a module and this problem may be a deal breaker for me for using PrestaShop.

Version: 1.5.6.2 Hosting: Bluehost I have created a new product. For this product, there are 11 attributes to choose from and a total of 42 values split between the 11 attributes. When I 'add' these and then press the 'generate these combos' button, it loads a blank white screen with a really long URL. So I tried just adding a few combinations and it worked just fine. Is there a limit to what the combo generator is able to generate? [ 11 attributes total ] 3 values 6 values 2 values 5 values 3 values 3 values 2 values 5 values 6 values 4 values 3 values This is a fresh install of PS and this is my first product. Here is the URL that is produced: http:// [ my domain ] /shop/ [ name of my admin folder ] /index.php?controller=adminattributegenerator&id_product=1&attributegenerator&token=6f1b1a858f08bd5f27e858db09597eb5

@ ufctemple1, I can't really speak for the workings of support for Prestashop. I'm new here as well and trying out Presta in an attempt to figure out what e-commerce platform I'm going to use for my next business idea. I'm not surprised at all at your Magento experience. It is truly a beast to handle. I had a friend who experienced the same exact thing. Spent months developing it and tossed about $5k at it only to figure out it was just too much to get going. What I found right off the bat is that you really have to have webhosting that is setup specifically for running Magento, perhaps much more so than other e-commerce solutions. That seems to be the first and foremost thing there. Second, if you want to accomplish any customization, you need to hire not just a web developer, but someone who specializes and is certified in Magento development. I had very experienced designers work on a project for me that was Magento based and even they were having difficulty with some things. I think Magento is a great solution for someone that has a web-dev team on staff already and they are ready to put forth a lot of money to develop a top-notch store that moves 1000's of products a day. So far I like PrestaShop for a small business solution. I'd like to find some really big stores using Presta and browse them to see how well those sites work. Still doing lots of research and feeling out this PrestaShop stuff. Regarding the comparison between free WP and free PS and their related communities, you have to remember that WP has a way larger community, probably due to the fact that way less people need e-commerce than who just need a regular website/blog platform. Therefor I think there is going to be a much smaller community for any e-commerce platform when compared to WP. Small community of course means less plugins, less forum discussion, etc. This was a big problem with Magento that I had. Support community seemed almost non-existent. So many questions went unanswered on the forums.

I also struggle internally to not feel a let down when I can't get a question answered. But then I remember that every expert on this forum as well as the entire community are probably doing all of this for free, answering questions, taking the time to explain things in detail, figuring out fixes to our problems because we simply aren't talented or knowledgeable enough to figure out the problem ourselves. Not to mention Presta Shop is completely free e-commerce solution. I think this makes it a solid solution when compared with many others. That being said, I've worked with several other systems including xcart, magento, virtuemart and those suffer from the same support problems. Post a problem on the forums and you wait days and often never get an answer to your problem. I especially found this to be the case with Magento, which is a complicated beast of an e-commerce system and not user friendly at all. Not to mention it cost a whopping $15,000 (starting price) now that eBay has bought a majority share of the software. I think PrestaShop is a solid choice for a small storefront, but yah I do understand the feeling of being frustrated when nobody chimes in. Hopefully someone can chime in soon for you. I have found in the past that quite often just paying money to hire a really good coder can solve a ton of headache really fast. I know it's not always feasible but if you're serious about business, sometimes it's the only way to go for complex customization to your store front.

I want 1.6 to have clean URL's. That is my biggest wish. I don't want to have to use plugins or heavy customization to make it happen, and then have to maintain/manage the tweak every upgrade.

Any word on whether the 1.6 will offer an option to remove the ID from the URL? Would love to see clean URLs in the newest version.