If not, how best for store admin to choose unique sets of vendor products to present to customers?
We have used product tagging in the past, but they have recently been effectively removed from the application.
Surely the need for product curation is not unique just to our shop?
We created our own massive set of product categories that we call "collections". We use it to curate coordinating products created by a single or multiple vendors. We maintain it completely manually though.
How hard would it be to simple add a matching classname to the category controls?
Then we could just hide all the individual category controls we want from vendors using just css.
What I did was add a bit of code to the template that notes the category ID in the class, then used css to hide the ones I want hidden. Not ideal but it definitely worked.
Using that approach, you'd obliterate the boundaries between business logic and presentation. Not a good way.
Proper way would be to add a property to categories in MVE thatindicates the vendor permissions. I.e. hidden from, read-only, read/write (default read/write). then utilize the get_category/update_category type hooks to honor that flag appropriately.
We'd love to do it that way, for both vendors & admin, but do not know how. There is a SIGNIFICANT need for a much more comprehensive user group based permissions system. The default permissions options are seriously inadequate for large teams with very specific, limited roles.
The built in inclusive categories restrictions (now in Vendor Plans) is likewise unsustainable even by import / export. We have thousands of categories that change often. The only way it would work for us is if we could only list the categories we'd like to exclude, rather than include. Also we don't allow vendors to put products directly in our parent categories; the ability to block that automatically would be fabulous.
Considering how many people post on this forum asking how to hide specific things in vendor / admin, it really surprises me there isn't a great add-on available to handle all of these permissions issues. We'd certainly buy an affordable add-on, but our budget for custom work goes to more critical functionality issues rather than things like this that are simply highly inconvenient.