A Product which has Attributes that are other products?

[robnjay]

We are building a ZenCart for my daughter's website.

One of the products they currently sell on their (built from scratch??) website is a "Beginners Kit" for homebrewing. When the customer views the product page for this kit, he/she is presented with a dropdown from which a type of brew can be selected. Each of the selections in the list is really a product (an "ingredients kit") the user can buy separately to make more of this type of brew later.

The kit has a price which doesn't change because of the brew selection, even though it is possible that some of the ingredients kits are different prices than others...

Not all the ingredients kits for sale on the website are suitable for beginners, so the dropdown presents only those that are.

How should we set up these products so that we can present this sale to the customer?

Also, we may wish to have a "beginner's corner" or some such thing which is a page that presents "beginner's" items across more than one store category. Is this possible? Does this also have to be handled when designing products & categories?

[jbaggs]

I also need to have product attributes that are other products. However I'm fairly sure it is something outside of the scope of what zen cart can do...

Here is what I'm doing:

We sell casino supplies and collectables. Many of the items we sell are "Set Items". That is they contain two or more products, each available and stocked individually, combined to create a complete set. A good example would be poker chip sets...

A set of poker chips would typically contain, a case, two decks of cards and some quantity if poker chips in varius colors... These sets are custom built to order and on a, at least daily basis, we have to cancel orders due to not having stock of a specific color poker chip. Mainly whites or reds.

The pokers chips are sold seperately on our site and would show a zero stock status, if the end user was to check.

One style of poker chips going out of stock could effect a 100 or more set items on our site, and often the end user will substitute a differant color chip for the color we are out of stock on.

If there was or is a way to have other items in our cart system be attrabutes for these set items it would make my year.

Even if this is not possible, being able to have the stock levels of other items appear on the set items page would prevent alot of issues for us. That is to show the items in the set and the current invetory levels so the end user can see if we have low or no stock on something required to complete the set item.

Even if it this would require code to be somehow entered in the product description area...

Any comments or suggestions would be great.

[robnjay]

OK, Zen Heroes, is this REALLY outside the scope of the Zen Cart?

Does the status for this one change with 1.38?

What we want is to be able to create a product that is a combination of other products....

[accurax]

Need to revive this thread im afraid.... do we have an answer?.... i really need to get this working aswell :)

[flite]

I'm having the same problem. Only solution I can come up with is to make attributes and products from the same thing. This will screw up the inventory tracking, but its a sacrifice I might have to make.

Please let me know if anyone can figure this one out.

[tated]

I'll join the chorus for this question.

In my case I'm selling music - both a hard CD and/or mp3 downloads. I need both options to inhabit one product info page, hence the idea of attributes. But I need two independently functioning Add to Cart buttons - one for the CD and one for the downloads section. In other words, customers should be able to buy just the downloads without buying the hard CD.

I modified tpl_product_music_info_display.php to call a new file tpl_modules_music_attributes.php (instead of tpl_modules_attributes.php) so that I could customize music attributes, which will always be downloads. Then I had the zany idea that I could insert something like this at the beginning of tpl_modules_music_attributes.php in order to get a second form and Add to Cart button for the downloads:

</form>

<div id="productAttributes">

<!--bof Form start-->
<?php echo zen_draw_form('cart_quantity', zen_href_link(zen_get_info_page($_GET['products_id']), zen_get_all_get_params(array('action')) . 'action=add_product'), 'post', 'enctype="multipart/form-data"') . "\n"; ?>
<!--eof Form start-->

No luck. I have a very basic familiarity with PHP, so I'm not sure what to try here. For one thing, zen_href_link(zen_get_info_page($_GET['products_id']) is getting the product ID of, well, the product obviously (which is the CD). I'm sure there are other problems as well.

Suggestions?

Thanks,

tated

[Ajeh]

This is built in to Zen Cart ...

Option Name: Format (or anything you want)
Option Value: CD (or whatever)
Attribute Weight: 3

Option Name: Format (or anything you want)
Option Value: Zip File (or whatever)
Attribute Weight: 0
Download Name: blahblah.zip

Now the product will know it is a Download by that filename being there and you will have no shipping and not see the checkout_shipping page and when there isn't the Download it will see the weight on the attribute for the CD and know to use shipping and you will see the checkout_shipping ...

[tated]

Thanks Linda. In other words, make the CD another attribute of the general product. That makes sense, but there are a couple other specs I need to accomplish:

- Customers need to be able to select a quantity for the CD option, while they shouldn't be able to select download quantities (downloads are set up as checkboxes now)

- I'm working with a fairly specific page design from my client, who wants to visually separate the CD purchase section (top of the page) from the downloads (bottom of the page, below images and description). That's how I arrived at the two Add to Cart buttons.

I'm probably staring at the way to sort this out, but I don't see it yet. Thanks for any more good pointers.

[Ajeh]

Have you an URL to this product that we can look at?

Are your choices like:
CD
-- or --
MP3
-- or --
Zip

Or, are you doing different tracks? Or how are you using your checkboxes?

I was looking at:
Format:
CD
Download

with the choices being radio button or dropdown ... but they all belong to the same Option Name ...

[tated]

Yes, here's a URL, which will probably provide a better description than one I can write:

http://www.kateedmundson.com/nyco/sh...roducts_id=198

Ideally I would keep this basic layout and have a second Add to Cart button for the download section at the bottom of the page (minus the faulty anchor link).

You'll see how I've set up checkboxes; "Album" is a .zip, individual tracks are mp3s...