Do we have a roadmap for we would ideally like variations to work?

[Ben Huson]

Variation handling it always a pain but I have had some specific scenarios that have come up from clients regarding variations which I'm highlighting below as I think we need a sort of roadmap for the kind of variation functionality we want to include (in an ideal world) or at east make pluggable so that it is possible to add the extra functionality via plugins.

Would welcome your thoughts on the following topics:

1. Ordering of variations

I think you may now be able to do this in the admin in the trunk development release but not sure that it follows through to order the menus correct on the front-end? The actual variation menus should be in the specified order, as well as the items within each menu.

2. Unpublishing/removing/hiding a specific variation

Say a T-shirt comes in Large (red / green / blue) but in Small only (red / green)

This should be two variation sets, Size and Colour, but you would want to remove the Small/blue variation product

There should be a way to do this?

3. Force variation selection order.

In that scenario I may want Size to be the first select menu and force the user to select a size before they can select a colour (disable the colour menu). This would be very important if you had the option to remove some variation products as mentioned in point 2 above. It would also allow you to disable items you could not select (which I think we've does in previous versions).

I'm not saying that these features MUST be how it works, only that the variations system need to be pluggable enough to add this functionality (or remove default functionality) easily if possible.

Anyone have any other variation gripes?

Thoughts?

Ben

[transom - One Big Idea]

Ben, I had to tackle these very issues for a client recently. We
decided that variations where the prices was zero - we would ignore
those variations.

Your item 1 can be handled by hooking to the filter -
wpsc_all_associated_variations in wpsc-includes/variations.class.php

Your item 3 - I had to build a javascript function to handle this.
Basically, you need to create an array of valid combinations.

If I can get my client's permission, you are welcome to a copy of the
code.

I could accomplish all this with the existing code - except for
filtering out zero dollar variations. I have suggested a filter in
issue #714 to provide this functionality.

- Tom Ransom
One Big Idea

[Chase Wiseman]

Excellent post, and I'd like to second this.

Unfortunately, a counter-intuitive variation UI seems to be a common
thread across all of the various WordPress e-commerce plugins. I hate
to say it, but I feel that WP e-Commerce's implementation is one of
the least intuitive. It's just plain confusing for a beginner (which
our clients usually are).

I feel like there needs to be clear goal of how variations SHOULD
work, then we need to bend WordPress to meet that goal.

[benjaminhuson]

Tom,

Thanks for responding.

I would like to see some of this functionality available as plugins - something I'll be trying to do as and when (and if) I am able.

I think I actually added the wpsc_all_associated_variations filter but it would be nice to use this via a plugin which adds in the necessary admin ui.

Ben

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[benjaminhuson]

Chase,

What are you thoughts or feedback on how it might work better?

I think the management of product variations when editing a product has improved a lot in recent versions, but I do feel there is lots of scope for making it better.

I do feel that although creating/managing variation sets as taxonomies is a good idea, the ui needs adapting from the default WordPress taxonomy ui. It would make more sense to display a list of sets that you click into or expand to add/edit variations within - more like in v.3.7. At the moment it feels a bit un-manageable if you have a few variation sets which Sian multiple admin pages.

Ben