Create child products with Main products title, when checking out

[sandstorm]

Hi,

I know how to create a simple products with Children & I can create a Product with stockable variants too - using the custom field for this. 
I followed the advice in this post http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=100480.0 and I also purchased the VM2 Guide book by Kerry Watson.

What I want to do (which I am struggling with and need some help/advice/guidance) is;

Create a Main Product that will have 4 Flavours.
The Flavours have there own Stock Control and they also have there own SKU code.

So I thought I needed to set up a Product with 4 Child products as the flavours. This works, in that each Flavour has a SKU and its own stock levels.

But doesn't show well in the users invoice or the order that comes through to admin because All that shows up is the Flavour Name & SKU - ABC123 - Chocolate
I need the Main Name & SKU & Child Product Name (Flavour)

i.e  Lets say the product is called Really tasty Milkshake and the Flavours are Chocolate, Vanilla, Banana & Strawberry
So I have named the main product "Really Tasty Milkshake" And I named the Child Products Title "Chocolate", "Strawberry", "Vanilla", "Banana"
How Can I get the Checkout, Orders & Invoice to show the Main Product title & The Child product Title?

Or am I going about this the wrong way completely?

I can't really Add each product title as "Really Tasty Milkshake - Strawberry" ,etc as this then appears in the flavour dropdown

Really appreciate any help/advice,
Andy

[sandstorm]

Does anybody have any insight / help / information for me on this?

It seems wrong to me that child products are set up this way, so I am hoping I am setting them up incorrectly

Andy

[blans]

Good question,

I did it like you stated. Really Tasty Milkshake - Strawberry. However I see your point. I'm not sure just having chocolate as child is a good option since the name also appears in the page title, url etc... It would be a bit strange to have just chocolate in the title. Just like you already found out in the Invoice.

The downside of this method is the huge amount of urls you get since every child has it's own url. Our premium hosting provider lets me pay for the CPU use of the server and that's a lot bigger when there are so many urls. Also for google this is probably not ideal.

Other methods are simply not working at the moment. I haven't yet seen any Virtuemart 2 shop that has the stockable variants working in another way as we are discussing here.

In my opinion ideal would be to have Really Tasty Milkshake and then select Flavour: Strawberry in a selection box. This should then be linked to that child to keep stock.

I'm currently checking out Opencart and CS-Cart for inspiration but there methods are also not working or very cumbersome.

Virtuemart would blow all competition away if it would have a solid solution but I don't get response that this has priority. Sorry.






 

[sandstorm]

This is a real big problem for me?

I cant understand that there are no other VM2 users (or few) that think this is a problem. 
I hadn't even considered the thought that Each child variant will create another URL,pagetitle, etc and this has now added to the problem!

In my current VM store (J1.5 VM1) all my products are set up as Parents with the flavours/sizes, etc as Children products, and this doesn't create 1000's of extra URL's

Here are ideas I'm thinking of, but I really don't want to start hacking VM2 if I can help it

1 - Does anybody think a new custom field plugin could be created along the lines of the stockable variant plugin? with maybe SKU added into it?

2 - Hack VM2 to display the main product title in Checkout/cart/orders and maybe also hack to only use the initial URL?  This is beyond me but I know developers that could do it. I just don't want to hack if possible.

Andy

[sandstorm]

OK After a bit more testing I realize that Stockable variant plugin just actually creates the child products for you(& does already include a field for adding SKU). So I'm back at square 1 with that idea.

So I now know that I need;

Child products to show full product title & the child title in Checkout, cart and orders/invoice page  - I know this can be done within template for cart and checkout but what about Orders/invoicing.

Also only want One URL/page title to be created for the Main product.

Can this be done/achieved without hacking VM2?

[blans]

Sandstorm,

I'm with you on this one. Need VM to do exactly the same thing.

The creation of 1000's of urls is a real problem in VM1.1.9 with Artio JoomSef.

We would indeed need one Parent Product Url but still see the selected child on the Checkout, Invoice.

Milbo stated to come with a totally revised children section in the next version (2.0.17?)

[Milbo]

The downside of this method is the huge amount of urls you get since every child has it's own url. Our premium hosting provider lets me pay for the CPU use of the server and that's a lot bigger when there are so many urls. Also for google this is probably not ideal.

VirtueMart2 is using now really less resscources. Usually an extra url does not create extra load, except you have some 3rd party sef installed, then it can be a problem, but it should not, if the 3rd party is correctly written. If you pay for calculation costs, then I am quite sure virtuemart 2 is one of the cheapest. Usually you set in your child at least another name and another sku. Very often another price and image. So it depends if it is good for google. Interesting point though.

Other methods are simply not working at the moment. I haven't yet seen any Virtuemart 2 shop that has the stockable variants working in another way as we are discussing here.

I saw a lot already. But what you say, that the dropdown should be automatically built is planned. When you check the dynamic child variant, then you can see that it has a drop down. The idea is that you can choose an attribute there for the dropdown.

1 - Does anybody think a new custom field plugin could be created along the lines of the stockable variant plugin? with maybe SKU added into it?

Of course, take the stockable plugin and adjust it to your needs. If you are a programmer it takes you maybe 1 hour. The only thing you want is a cosmetical thing. You dont want to see the full name in the dropdown.

[jjk]

I'm currently not using stock control but I suppose you could use "Really tasty Milkshake" as the parent product and add all flavours as 'Generic Child Variant' in the format "Really tasty Milkshake - Chocolate". Then unselect "Parent is orderable" and select "Display Parent as Option". Of course all your flavours will have their own url in this case, but from experience with my own shop I'm shure it has no negative effect in search engine ranking (appears to be better instead) and also doesn't add to time consuming calculations on your server, if you use Standard Joomla and VirtueMart SEF tools. (I really don't see any advantage using a third party SEF extension).

At present I have approximately 600 products in two languages, many with generic child products. Google's webmaster tools doesn't complain about all those extra urls at all. They are aware of the fact that a single product in a shop can be accessible through many different urls. They just recommend to use canonical urls, which Virtuemart does.

[sandstorm]

I have it all working perfectly from my needs in my initial post now.

I have parent & Dynamic child set up using the stockable variant plugin. It took me a while to figure it all out and put it together, but all working great.

I might write up some simple instructions to help any others and will post a link back here!

Anyone struggling with the same problem, feel free to give me a buzz on Skype  sandstorm871

[blans]

Sandstorm,

Please write that simple instructions manual. There are so many instructions out there on setting up Parents with Children that I'm totally lost here since most of them are followed by "this doesn't work for me posts".

I'm looking for one good instruction that simply gets it right.