Additional Product Fields

I can't seem to find an add-on that already does this so hopfully someone can help. What I am looking for is a way to have custom fields for products that will contain additional information about the product. (i.e. a hitch has towing weight, tounge weight, install time, etc).

Now i know that attributes can be set to read only, however i need these custom fields to be something the customer can use to "sort by" when looking at a list of some 50-100 products. Currently sort by is limited to price, brand, name, etc.

I am doing this on a site that is not yet live but will be using the most recent version of zen cart 1.3.9. I would like the flexiblity to make the custom fields different for products. For example, not all products will have an install time, so if that was customfield1 i would like the ability to make customfield1 install time for 1 category of products but make it wiring type for another category.

I know this sounds like a lot, but if there is anything remotely close that would be awsome :clap:

What you have described, while most likely very clear to you, is not at all clear to a reader

Need more specifics to even venture a guess at some schema for your products

This can all be done, but it's fairly specific to your site so would need custom development. I'm not aware of any existing add-ons that would do any of this for you.

You can add custom fields to the product globally. But you can't customize it for each category without coding it yourself.

You can however include it in your product description.

kobra:

What you have described, while most likely very clear to you, is not at all clear to a reader

Need more specifics to even venture a guess at some schema for your products

To try and be more exact i need to be able to have say 5 additional fields for a product that i can add info to and have those fields also be something the customer can sort by when viewing a list of products.

Hopfully this makes more sense:

We sell water filters. So lets say i have 2 categories of products: Sediment Filters and Whole House Filters.

For the products under sediment filters, when a custom clicks that category and sees a list of products i want them to be able to sort by: Size, micron (filter level), material type. These bits are not attributes in the sense of color and size you might find for clothing but fixed information the customer should be able to sort by.

The issue is, there is no place for me to put that information about the product when adding it to zen that would allow me to use it as a sort by option.

Custom coding. I don't think your going to find someone here that will walk you through the whole coding of this custom, site specific module.

I know, im not looking for a step by step. I was looking to see if an add-on already existed. I can write the code if needed, i have customized zen before but i would like to save myself the time if a module did exist. TBH, most major e-commerce systems have the ability to add custom fields to products, which is why i was surprised zen doesnt.

You might try a peek at this thread (http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=120523) which describes how to add new fields to products and/or the "Product Extra Fields" add-on (http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=1331) as potential starting points.

Here's an idea:

Is there a way to make products_description be a field that is generated by additional product fields?

For example, I can imagine an admin product page, where the user just fills in the additional fields, and the products_description is automatically generated.

One additional field could be something like 'additional_description' that could itself be a fallback if none of the additional fields are relevant. Then, products_description would be generated to only contain the content of 'additional_description'.

This would allow the use of 3rd party add-ons and zencart upgrades with minimal disruption. It would also make it easy to treat additional field content like tags, for searching and categorizing.

Has this been tried/done?