One of the joys of "rapid development models" is that a core set of assumptions is made at the beginning and there is no allowance for change. So even if it's wrong, it will be implemented incorrectly. It then becomes too much work to go back in and change things so that compatibility is maintained with both the wrong way and the right way. The resultant code will be more buggy than if the project was reset and new information incorporated into the core assumptions and then done right.
Sorry about the negativity, but this has gone on this way for the past 10 years that I've been involved with cs-cart. The cs-cart team only reaches out after they've implemented something and are very reluctant to admit that their assumptions were wrong or incomplete. Hence we end up with new features that are continually patched over the next year or so of releases to account for customer demands that could have been known if input was requested and acted on before implementation. Find a release that does NOT contain a paypal patch/fix of some kind. It changes every release and is a very mature interface.
Then in the end when you submit bug reports, you get "working as designed" even though the defect IS the design.
I'll return to not spending my time providing input that is almost always ignored. Cs-cart should be grateful that they have merchants and developers who are willing to spend time reviewing their plans (actually we never see plans, only rapid development implementations). But dumping a RC out there and expecting merchants and developers to do your testing for you is simply not gonna happen. If you have not built "testability" into your implementations, then that is something you need to correct internally. Your test cases should use realistic situations with a wide variety of data types. Relying on tee-shirts to represent a data set is naive.
After investigating current workflow of the variations, I've come to a conclusion that there should be an option to group products from the product search page. It should work like that:
1) You Go to Products-> Products. If you need to narrow the results you can use search bar
2) You select products, which you would like to group.
3) You click Group products button
4) There is a popu or some kind of other mechanism to fill out the required features.
It would highly speed up the process of creating product groups in cases when you import/export products or use some kind of other integration to create products outside of the cs-cart admin panel.
Please give me feedback, what you think and is this possible.
I will answer in english, because international forum in my opinion is dying and Imac only answers here.
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@ikoshkin, please provide us with the roadmap for the product variations. Which features of product variations are you planning to include with the description what problems this feature will solve (examples from the forum) and the estimated time of arrival. Right now there is too much chaos. Even though you provide us with video reports, there is not enough information and you keep the solutions to the problems which we point out as a secret.
This roadmap could be then a good starting point to figure out if there are no other flaws in the design of the new data structure.
I would disagree with your statement that “we keep the solutions a secretâ€. The whole point of the topic was to let people try the new variations, gather feedback, and see what can be improved. That’s exactly what we’re doing, and we’ve replied to plenty of issues raised, saying whether we’d do something about them, and what exactly.
Personally, I think that this individual approach is better than forcing people to go through the list of every possible issue that someone else might have with variations.
Unfortunately, we can’t answer every single request on the forum (both this and international) in full detail, or promise that we’ll do everything requested there. However, your feedback has already helped us immensely, and variations 2.0 will be better for it.
The 4.10.1 RC should be ready by the end of April, and there will be an official announcement about it at both forums.
P.S. Although it’s not stated in the rules anywhere, it would be best to keep discussion in English at the international forum https://forum.cs-cart.com/. I think I reply there just as much as I do here, at least when it comes to specific topics. One of the reasons why we split the forums was to avoid a mix of communication in different languages.
After investigating current workflow of the variations, I've come to a conclusion that there should be an option to group products from the product search page. It should work like that:
1) You Go to Products-> Products. If you need to narrow the results you can use search bar 2) You select products, which you would like to group. 3) You click Group products button 4) There is a popu or some kind of other mechanism to fill out the required features.
It would highly speed up the process of creating product groups in cases when you import/export products or use some kind of other integration to create products outside of the cs-cart admin panel.
Please give me feedback, what you think and is this possible.
It does sound perfect for your use case (because you've explained to me how exactly you create products), and may be useful to other people as well (but that depends highly on how exactly they create products). However, we probably won't implement it unless there's high enough demand/need for it.
I doubt that we'll improve the flow of variation creation before 4.10.1. Changing the interface of something as basic as variations shouldn't affect backward compatibility, so it's not a reason to keep the add-on in beta. Besides, it is a significant undertaking, so we'd first need feedback from more merchants (or usage statistics from those who have explicitly allowed us to use it).
Hi,
I've checked the dev.demo.cs-cart.ru and discovered that you implemented common item name.
Unfortunately, it doesn't cover the use cases which we were talking about.
Please do the following:
1) Activate common item name in Variations Addon settings
2) Assign common item name to t-shirt products (T-Shirt White, T-Shirt Blue, T-Shirt Black)
3) Now let's imagine that T-Shirt Black Medium (Product code: TSHIRT3) is no longer available in our store and we want to change the status to hidden. If we change the default variation to product code TSHIRT4 it doesn't get common item name and we have to retype it again.
Now imagine, that you have 40 000 products in store... I hope you get my point.
Moreover, I've checked show out of stock items option in settings. The problem with not being able to access products if the parent product has 0 stock has not been solved. Are you guys working on it?
I've checked show out of stock items option in settings. The problem with not being able to access products if the parent product has 0 stock has not been solved. Are you guys working on it?
This task already got assigned to a sprint, and the problem will be addressed before the release of 4.10.1. Maybe not in 4.10.1 RC though - the RC has a different purpose (for example, checking the conversion of variations 1.0 and option combinations into variations 2.0).
I've checked the dev.demo.cs-cart.ru and discovered that you implemented common item name.
Unfortunately, it doesn't cover the use cases which we were talking about.
Please do the following: 1) Activate common item name in Variations Addon settings 2) Assign common item name to t-shirt products (T-Shirt White, T-Shirt Blue, T-Shirt Black) 3) Now let's imagine that T-Shirt Black Medium (Product code: TSHIRT3) is no longer available in our store and we want to change the status to hidden. If we change the default variation to product code TSHIRT4 it doesn't get common item name and we have to retype it again.
I've just tested it and couldn't reproduce the problem. I set "Catalog item name" (it's a separate product property, right next to the name) for a default variation, saved my changes, and made sure that the property worked. Then I selected another variation as default and saw that it got the same "Catalog item name". So, the "Catalog item name" got assigned to the new default variation without issues.
My site was dead after that and i was seeing this error on my store front
Smarty Compiler: Syntax error in template "design/themes/vivashop/templates/addons/product_variations/hooks/products/product_features.override.tpl" on line 3 "{$product = $product|fn_product_variations_merge_features}" unknown modifier "fn_product_variations_merge_features" -->
I have deleted this line of code " {$product = $product|fn_product_variations_merge_features} "from the file product_features.override.tpl and its live now.
Please guide me what are possible malfunctions which i am going to face next.
When editing a feature that is a variation group, it would be good to provide a button next to a product feature that will tell the "SAVE" button to copy the value of that feature to all other products in the variation group.
Basically what we will do is setup our base product and then create the variations... we might have up to 30 variations on the original product.
If we need to update something in the product description for a variation, it would be good to be able to get that across to all the other products without having to edit them manually.