Adding product Family indicator / field

[desquinn]

We have a collection of products that are in families that spread across their respective categories. An example would be the following:

• Product Light 1 (Family HE-1000) - Category Unmanaged
  
• Product Light 2 (Family HE-1000) - Category Managed
  
• Product Light 3 (Family HE-1000) - Category Standard
  
• Product Light 4 (Family HE-2000) - Category Unmanaged
  

W hat we are thinking of doing the now is to create a separate product category hierarchy called Product Family and have the HE-1000 etc under that but I would like to be able to have the following if possible.

 

I would like to have a field on the back end (maybe a feature?) where the client can specify the product family and then on the front end under Product reference on the product page I could have a similar Product family field that they click on and see a search list of all products with that field filled in with the same product family id.

 

Any thoughts on this? I think I can get some of the way there with a feature but it would be better if the field was on the first page on the backend of the product page.

 

TIA

[desquinn]

That is what I am doing at present so does not help me unfortunately. I would like to be able to do this without alternate categories.

[sebkos]

Hi,

 

what about Tags?

[desquinn]

tags may work so thanks for that but I was hoping for some sort of field in the back end that the client could set on a per product basis. If I was to use Tags can I reference a specific tag? I would still like to be able to have a Product Family: HE-1000 item on the relevant product page

 

If there is a tag list on a product then how do we extract only the specific "family tag" that we would be after?

 

TIA

[sebkos]

I'm not sure I understand you correctly, but please look at this http://mohsart.se/en/. That's not my web site but it shows how you can use Tags, there they are called "Authors". Check also any product page.

[desquinn]

This is roughly what I would like to have and authors on a book shop is a very good analogy of what I am trying to achieve. I dont want to have categories full of authors but I do want to be able to click on the author and see the list of the books on the site that are associated with them.

 

Instead of authors I would like it to be a "product family" but I would not want the client to lose all the tags functionality either so if I was to use tags then I would need a method of extracting the "product family" tags for the products tags. The tags would look like this in one example:

 

tags: he-1000, led, exit, emergency

 

out of these all I would want to use for the product family feature is the he-1000 tag. Any ideas?

 

thanks for the help so far.

[sebkos]

I see. So you probably have to use "features" and have to find solution for filtering (own code or ready module). Are you going to use "suppliers", maybe that's the way?

[desquinn]

I had thought of suppliers as they only use one but that's clumsy so ideally something that could have been added as a single field would have been great. May be able to use tags exclusively for this but that's again clumsy but it may be the best I can do apart from a feature which is where I started with this

 

maybe some one else will have some insight