How to add a second manufacturer to a product or sort by any way you want

[Guest]

I was trying to add a second manufacturer to some of our products. I can think of several reasons someone would want to do this but for us we wanted to use the manufacturers box to sort products by coffee growing regions but our blends come from several regions so could not be added. We looked at the osC standard code and could not easily do this so we had to come up with a more creative solution. Our solution is;

 

1) Get rid of the manufacturer box altogether (sounds dumb but you do not need it for this work around).

2) JCall (bless his coding skills) added a wonderful little contribution that allows you to have more than one category box. It is called More Category Boxes. In other words you can have your main Category box and then create a second category box and call it Manufacturers. Both boxes can have totally different categories in them so your category box can have Hardware, Software, etc and your Manufacturers category box can have Hewlett Packard, Fox, Microsoft, etc. You will of course need to create categories with the names of all your Manufacturers.

3) There is a little often overlooked feature in the osC admin which will help with the next part which ties it all together. From your Categories / Products page in the Admin, highlight a product just as you would to edit it but do NOT press edit. Instead press Copy To and then Link your product to one of your NEW Manufacturer categories and then repeat as many times as you like. There is no limit to the number of categories that a product can be linked to.

 

Now you have your Categories box, your fake Manufacturers box and you can easily link your products to multiple manufacturers without getting messy with code. JCall's contribution installs in about 2 minutes and the rest is just editing via your admin and works perfectly.

 

We use this to sort products (coffee) by growing region but it could be used to sort product by price, by warehouse, colour, size, etc. The functions are there, it is all about making it easier for your customer to choose/find the a product in the most convenient way possible for them.

[photofxplus]

Cool man!

[♥bruyndoncx]

be aware that multiple categories is not supported in the easy populate import, so it is really something you have to do manually.

Not sure what the EP export results would give, anyone who could try this ?

[Guest]

Cool man!

 

I thought so too. :thumbsup:

 

multiple categories is not supported in the easy populate import

 

Hi Carine, I do not use easy populate as I only have a limited number of products. I think it just adds to the products_to_categories table so you will have

 

 

products_id, categories_id

 

100, 1

100, 2

100, 3

 

So the same product is linked to 3 categories in the above example. I don't know if you can add that to Easy Populate.

[surplus54]

I have spent the better part of two weeks hacking around trying to find someone, ANYONE, who has or could modify the tree system of "Manufacturers" to be the same style as "Categories" with a sub-cat and then a sub-cat to the sub-cat, and on.

 

Your answer is what I've been looking for. Is there a branch level you need to stop at or a level at which the system might become unstable? Guess what I'm looking for here is, how may levels below the top are you operating at?

 

I've learned "garbage in-garbage out" once too often and am spending tons of time in the background setting up before I dump my 5000+ items in the "store" to be drawn to a cutomers shopping cart.

 

Newbie to OSC but have been using computers for distribution since 1974.

 

Thanks for any assistance.

 

Jim