BarryH

Look at Store Manager from eMagic One. It makes managing attributes, combinations, images, image titles, etc. much easier when you have a lot of them. I am not affiliated with them. I am just a customer that appreciates their product.

Do you need to show a specific illustration of the color? Can the color be recreated using only a number (RGB, CMYK or similar) or would an image be required to illustrate? For example, "red" is a color that can be represented and reproduced by a number (#ff0000), "red plaid" would require an image. Color attributes are a special kind of attribute (colors that can be represented by a number). The information for a color attribute is associated with the attribute. Other attributes (like those that require images to illustrate) are just words ("red plaid"). After you create a combination product with an attribute "red plaid", you would upload an image to associate with the combination product. The information (image) for a non-color attribute is associated with the product. Alternatively, you may not need an image to illustrate the color. For example, people understand "chrome" without seeing it. If you DO want to show an example of the chrome product, handle it like "red plaid" above: - Create an non-color type attribute called "chrome". (Again, this is just a WORD that will appear in your pull-down select list. It can mean whatever you want it to.) - Create a combination product using the "chrome" attribute. - Upload an image of the chrome product to associate with the product.

Where and when do you want the new products to appear? By default, with the New Products module functionality, new products are displayed in the New Products section with a "New" banner over the image for N days after they are added to the catalog. I'm not sure what would be required to move this functionality (image banner, N days automation and all) into a category. On the other hand, you could easily group your new products into a unique category and manually control their inclusion/exclusion: - Disable the New Products module functionality. - Create a category called "New Products". - Manually, associate/disassociate your products with the category called "New Products" at whatever point in time you want. - Optionally, add the "New Products" category item to your menu. - I suspect it might be relatively easy to add the "New" banner image just for that category with a little code change.

Unfortunately, I don't believe that there is a back-office setting to turn this functionality on/off. (At least, there isn't in version 1.6.0.9, which I use.) There are a couple of ways to solve it, though: (1) Change the CSS code for this item to "display:none", or (2) Edit the code (probably in product.tpl) to disable the generation of this content. I haven't given you files and exact lines of code because I'm not sitting in front of it right now but these are the basic methods. I have removed that content from my site but, to be honest, I don't remember which method I used.

Any thoughts?

Back-office, Catalog, Products. Edit the product. On Prices tab, turn off checkbox "Display the 'On Sale' icon".

In the backoffice, turn on "Allow Out of Stock Purchase". I believe that there is a master default setting and each product also has the ability to select allow, disallow or do whatever the master setting says.

You have (at least) 4 options: (1) Allow AddToCart button on all products, including combination products. This is the default behavior that produces the problem you initially described. (2) Disable the AddToCart button for combination products. This prevents the customer from placing the default combination in the cart without selecting a variant. Instead, it forces the customer to click through to the product page to select the specific variant. This can be done easily in the back office (Preferences->Products->Product Page: Display the "add to cart" button when a product has attributes=NO). NOTE: This actually affects the category pages, not the specific product page. (3) CUSTOM DEVELOPMENT: Disable the AddToCart button for all products on category, manufacturer, etc. pages. I just finished doing this. It's not too painful if you're comfortable digging around in code. (4) CUSTOM DEVELOPMENT: Re-direct the AddToCart button link to the Quick View link for combination products. I was just looking at this and, again, it doesn't look TOO scary but I haven't done it.

One way to do this is to change the name of the attribute accordingly. This works well as long as you don't have thousands of products that require this approach. Say, for example, you want to offer 4 variations of the movie "The Matrix". You could create an attribute group called: The Matrix Options. Within that group, create 4 attributes named: - Blueray - $19.99 - DVD - $14.99 - VHS - $4.99 - Betamax - $0.99 Then, in the product for "The Matrix", create your combination products using this attribute group. That will give you 4 combination products and the select list will contain the text (AND price) spelled out in the name of each attribute. You then change the price impact aspect of each combination product to yield the price shown in the select list. The downside is that if you change prices, you also have to change the attributes' names to match the new prices. Worst case scenario, you could create an attribute for every product SKU you have. More likely, some products may require this approach and can be grouped to use a shared attribute group while others will require dedicated attributes. I use explicit attributes like this when I have a family of products with a range of prices that I want to lump into one product page. Then, insert a table within the product description outlining the specific characteristics of each product within the family.

Biggest issue seems to be related to placement of "Sign In | contact | sitemap | bookmark" links top right. I'm just starting to dabble with CSS and don't quite understand how the layout was achieved on the old version with 2 links above cart and 2 links below. However, just playing with your page, deleting the "header_links" element brings the cart block up where it should be. The logo can be adjusted down where it should be by changing the padding around the logo from 15px to 45px (header .row #header_logo { padding-top: 45px;). This doesn't solve the problem of how to get the links where they need to be but it's a couple pieces of the puzzle.

Using this feature, the AddToCart button can be hidden for attribute-enabled products on the home page as well. Homefeatured block, Newproducts, etc. all use product-list.tpl which implements this logic. With (Display the "add to cart" button when a product has attributes = NO), products displayed on the home page (by homefeatured block, newproducts block, etc.) have no Add to Cart button displayed. The customer then has two options: (1) Click "Quick View" which brings up pop-up window that includes attribute selection. (2) Click "More" (or product) which loads the product page that includes attribute selection. SO... Your two alternatives are: (1) Use the (Display Add to Cart=NO) option with functionality as described above. (2) Create custom logic to detect when AddToCart button is pressed for attribute-enabled products on home page, provide some custom method (display and logic) to select the particular attributes the customer wants and then pass that on to the cart logic. I know which one I'm using...

How difficult would it be to disable/change the logic applied by the New Products Block? Currently, this block identifies new products with hard-coded logic based around the date the product was added. If the product was added less than "n" days ago, it is displayed with a "New" banner across the product image and it is automatically included in the New Products section on the home page. I would prefer this functionality operate similarly to the HomeFeatured Block, where I can explicitly control which products are included in the set, rather than automatically including EVERY product added within a particular timeframe. I still want products displayed in the New Products section and I want those product images to include the "New" banner across them. I just want to be able to manually control WHICH products are considered to be "New". Easy or a lot of work?

Abso-frickin'-lutely.

This is default Prestashop behavior. There is an option in the back office to turn off the AddToCart button for combination products on the front or category pages. This forces the customer to click through to the product page and make the proper selection there.

Comments? Thoughts? Observations?