Running VM 2.0.10, Joomla 2.5.6, PHP 5.3.15
After reviewing the UI and the code, I've made the following determinations regarding ordering:
- Parent products have an order column, but only available when filtering the products list to parent products only. HOWEVER,
- You cannot order the parent products by changing the numbers in the order input fields and clicking the little disk icon in the order column to save it. Doing so seems to "reset" the numbering to some random order I don't really understand.
- Changing the order by using the up and down icons "sort of" works. I say sort of because moving a product up in the list decrements its ordering number by 1, but does not increment the order of the product above it by one, resulting in duplicate numbering. For example, If you want to move product in position 3 to position 2 by clicking the up arrow, you'll then have that product with order number 2 as well as the product above it with order number 2. You have to then click the down arrow on the product that was above to get the numbering correct again. Extremely tedious!
- Child Products cannot be ordered at all, yet despite this, the product model's query orders them by "ordering DESC", which is firstly incorrect (should be "ASC" - you wan't 1 followed by 2 etc, not 10 followed by 9 etc). Since "ordering" is not used at all with child products and you can't change their sort order at all (that I can tell) it's always NULL, resulting in a completely random order being outputted. See \administrator\components\com_virtuemart\models\product.php, function getUncategorizedChildren, line 1923 which reads:
"$q .= ' GROUP BY `virtuemart_product_id` ORDER BY ordering DESC';"
The easy sorting of products of all kinds, be it parents or children, I would think is something that should be standard for any ecommerce platform, let alone one of Virtuemart's magnitude.
So, either somebody will (please) tell me that my observations are completely wrong and I've missed something entirely (I really hope that's true), or there's a major problem with ordering of products, both with manual ordering of parents and the fact that child products cannot be ordered at all.