Ugly Attributes Drop Down

[smokey2k]

Hey I am certainly not knew to e-comm but I have recentley started working for a company that uses oscMax (Sorry but I was used to zencart) ; however I LOVE oscMax and LOVE OPEN SOURCE! So the cart is def wayyyy better then zencart or x-cart!

Now the site I am currently making is selling lets say socks for diabetics. Now the socks come in a variety of colors, size, and length. I deal with 3 manufacturers and they all have SKU's that werent used when the site was built (fixing this def on my to do list), so the orders are basically shipped from the attributes. Now I got the cart working fine, but there's 2 things KILLING ME and I cant seem to figure out where's the fix or mod for it (searched all mods nothing seemed to help!).

1: I added a search bar to search by attributes however, all 700 attributes are in there (ie: manufacturer 1's color is blue, but manufacturer 2 only does blue #8, manufacturer 1 uses Small, Medium, Large for sizes, but manufacturer 2 uses I , II , III , IIII) now rather have the drop down show "Small, Medium, Large, I, II, III, IIII, blue, blue #8, etc) I would rather either;
A) First have user select manufacturer then, enable another drop down w/ the attributes for that manufacturer (ie: if we used manufacturer 1 the drop down for attributes search would be "Small, Medium, Large, Blue")
B) Have the cart be able to determine I goes into Small Attrib, II Goes to Medium, III Goes To Large, Blue #8 goes to Blue, so the end-user doesnt get confused seeing all the sizes, and different blue's)

2) When the end-user gets to the add product to cart screen where he specifies his attributes (size, color) as he changes the size the SKU (are stores SKU which I will make it needed to go this route) changes as well (ie: Sock1 's SKU is currently 0001 because no attributes have been selected and 0001 is the base of the products SKU; now the end-user specifies his attributes, size: Small, color: blue changes the SKU to 000112. So the cart automatically adjusts the SKU as the attributes change just like Jobst and Juzo Leg Wear, Compression Clothing, Medical Compression Stocking, Plastic Surgery Products - CompressionStore.com.


Any idea's on how to do this? The store looks awesome and as I said this is my first attempt w/ oscMax and I sort of got thrown into this and want to stick w/ oscMax and not go back to zencart. But the attributes drop down is so ugly right now & clunky and has so much irrelevent attributes assigned to it there must be a way to fix that, and the whole SKU mess.

[pgmarshall]

In answer to your questions:

1) Simplest way to achieve this is move the manufacturer into the category tree and this way they do not muck up your attributes

eg.
Socks
-- Travel Socks
---- Manufacturer 1
------ Blue | Small
------ Blue | Medium
------ Blue | Large
---- Manufacturer 2
------ Blue | I
------ Blue | II
------ Blue | III
---- Manufacturer 3
etc.

It is always best to try and not ram everything into the attributes as it makes it difficult for the customer and the store admins to maintain.

Or, you could move the colour or size into the menu structure ... it all depends on how you think your customers shop for your products.

2) SKU management is in v2.5 Beta 3 (although I think there is a bugtracker report outstanding on it at the moment) - Look in product attributes.

Regards,

[ridexbuilder]

Only just spotted this, as it was posted in the wrong section.

osCmax 2.0.25 SVN has attribute SKU.
In addition, you can select in admin to use multiple option types eg. sequenced dropdowns.
There now is a return to using radioboxes and checkboxes, which will give you more scope in page design.