Magento Multi-Step Product Configuration - php

I'm currently attempting to extend the inherent Magento product view to divide the custom options belonging to a configurable product into sections loaded by ajax. The end goal is to create a step by step process guiding the user through each step of the product configuration process before they would add the product to the cart.
Advanced Custom Product Options
We are also utilizing Mageworx's Advanced Custom Product Options to allow for the larger customization of products.
Simple Products Linked to Configurable
Our current environment is set up to handle simple products as configurators for their parent configurable product. When a user navigates to the simple product, they are directed to the configurable product with the option represented by the simple product pre-selected.
End Goal
The hopeful endpoint would be that once a user clicks on a simple product, they would be redirected to the configurable product with a single pre-selected option depending on the simple product. The user would then be able to customize their order, or jump directly to adding it to the cart as is. The customization process would re-evaluate at each step to determine if there is a concurrent step, for example, if the user were to select to add trim, there would be an additional step to customize that trim, whereas if they opted out, the step would be skipped.
The idea is simply a product configurator within the Magento framework, something similar, in function, as to what appears below. The checkout steps being Style, Color, and Size, each which have their own page.
The Overarching Question
I am fairly new to the development of Magento, and am wondering what the best method of attacking this problem is. I have thought of using an observer to hook into before add to cart, but I am unsure it would allow me to refresh the blocks and load in new data. My other idea was to tap into view.phtml and set up some ajax loading within the page itself, but that seemed a bit 'hacky'.
I have spent quite a while searching for examples on how some have overcome this problems, but haven't found much outside of some very vague ideas on what could work. If any one has insight onto a solution to my problem, their thoughts would be much appreciated.
Current Approach
So far I've tried creating a Router for a Controller to handle POST requests to change out the Product Option sidebar when a value is changed. It seems a little bit slow, however.

Related

Magento Customization Issues

I am building a custom tool where the user can play around with the product (customize parts and add colors) and then go ahead and buy. I have so far built this in PHP but would like to integrate it with my Magento store. Is there a way I can connect this to Magento so that the product can be passed through Add to Cart etc?
Thanks.
Magento already has a support for this.
Check the configurable products, or the Custom options tab in the product admin edit page. You can also use bundle products.
If none of these fit your needs then you may want to rephrase your question and explain what exactly do you need.

Magento tasks for learning

I am learning Magento. I have already installed and gone through admin side.
Have done for adding customers ,Products ,Pricing or other stuffs. Now I want to learn more things (currently don't want to go for code and database).
Can anyone post here sample tasks (specially for learning). Because as I said am new to magento and don't konow exactly what type of tasks we can do in Magento.
I want some good tricky and sample tasks to do in magento. So I can learn it more.
1.) Change the favicon logo.
2.) Change the magento home page logo.
3.) Change the Top links "name" Ex: My Cart as image.
4.) Adding new link in top links.
5.) Move the top menu navigation as left menu navigation.
6.) Creating banner slider in home page
7.) Listing the feature products in home page.
8.) Need to put newsletter subscription in footer area.
9.) Removing the magento ads in right column (i.e) The dog and poll removing.
10.) Adding the new column in sort by order in category page.
11.) In product detail page need to show product description and some other information as tab format.
12.) Magento registeration need to enable extra options like company name, phone number, address, user type.
13.) Each customer group need to show different type of price for products.
14.) While importing products we to import the tier price to each products.
15.) Creating new attributes to products. And need to import values to that new attribute.
16.) Adding custom new column while registering a customer. And it need to show in admin side as editable.
Basically you are in e-commerce domain and magneto is a e-commerce framework which provide a platform to build e-commerce application with some build in out of the box functionality so that the developer at the end of the day not have to start building things from scratch.
what type to tasks we can do in Magneto.
being a eCommerce platform it provides you out of the box functionality ranging from product management,category/catalog management,shipping,checkout process,user management,post order process etc and many other things.
E-commerce in itself start from application like B2C (Business to customer), B2B (business to business).
I want some good tricky and sample tasks to do in magento
i am not sure what exactly you mean by this statement what you want to learn how exactly flow going on or how you can customize the things.
my suggestion is to explore some e-commerce implementations like amazon,eBay etc see how things flow there and than come out what you want to have in all.
i have not worked with magento but being in e-commerce domain i know every platform provide some sample reference application so it should be the case with Magento so just run that application and see how flow is going on and play around with it.
one thing that seems good to start is checkout process as it is always an integral part of any B2C implementation.
Other aspect is Product content management.
How about learning to create tier prices for customer options? I am quite sure that you need this for the future someday.
Magento allows tier prices for products and prices for individual options. However, tier prices for individual options are not supported. Tier prices for individual options are needed e.g. when selling promotional items or textiles with custom imprints. To create individual tier prices just try one of these three options:
one of these three options:
Realizing the surcharges with Cart Price Rules
Simple Configurable Products / Better Configurable Products
Generating additional individual options with prices
In my opinion the last one is the best solution. An individual option only allows one surcharge, when more are needed (one for each tier price you want to have). So you create several options with different prices. By doing so the following module might help you. You can request it for free at: http://www.code4business.de/kontakt-impressum/.
This module requires entering of tier prices and individual options in the backend. Afterwards the prices of the individual options for each tier price are entered in the newly generated options. When you save it, the following table of individual options will be generated. In this table, the tier prices can be entered for the original individual options. After filling out all these fields, the result is expected to be in the checkout.
I hope this is the kind of learning-idea you imagined! If you have further questions just take a look at this link. It offers you detailed descriptions with pictures how to create tier prices:
http://www.code4business.de/tier-prices-for-magento-custom-options-en/

Magento cart/order validation and manipulation

I'm completely new on working with Magento and I'm going to create a module in order to validate and in some cases manipulate some cart/order information.
To be specific I'm gonna restrict the customer from buying an item more than X times.
I've started working on this a bit, but I'm not so satisfied with the solution.
This is how I've done it so far:
I've created a new module with a controller which subclasses Mage_Checkout_CartController and there I've implemented the addAction-method. So every time a product is added to the cart I search through the user's order history and look for previous orders containing this product. Then I prevent it from being added and trigger an error-message.
It has a lot of shortcomings. For instance, if the customer isn't logged in at the time he can add the product, you can update the cart with too many... etc.
I would be me comfortable if I could hook on events, but I don't know where to start. Haven't found so good guides about this.
I want to do this verification when listing cart, updating cart and before submitting order.
So, my questions are:
How do I add observers on these events in my module? I couldn't get config.xml-configuration for event observing to work. I also need to know the names of these events.
How do I manipulate the quantity of an item in cart / delete it? When updating cart with too many of the products I want to change the quantity and trigger an error.
If you have any other ideas on a better solution for this, you're very welcome to comment.
I appreciate any help. Thanks.
I think this article should answer on all your questions. See events list at the bottom of this article. Do not forget delete cache after each change made to config.xml and other xml files in your module etc folder.

Magento configure a product while comparing

I'd like to add some functionality to the comparing feature Magento offers. When comparing products, users are presented with an 'Add to cart' button. This feature only works well for simple products. When pressing the add to cart button on a configurable or bundled product the user is redirected to the product detail, out of the compare view.
Would it not be much better when a user could configure the products inside the compare view?!
Do you guys know of a magento plugin that does this trick? Or have ideas how this feature could be implemented in the existing source?
This is something that comes up from time to time as I develop Magento sites. The gist of the problem is this: the logic for dealing with configurable/bundle/etc products is not simple. The JS code that was written to handle this convoluted logic is written is such a way that multiple products on the same page cannot be accomodated.
So, to do what you want, the first thing to do is to simplify your products down significantly. The brunt of the complexity is dealing with multiple configurable attributes and changing pricing, etc. After that, you'll need to rewrite the configurable product JS to set up the submit form properly. Once you get the right data submitted, you should be pretty safe.
Hope that gives you a hint!
Thanks,
Joe

Are there any WordPress based e-commerce plugins that allow me to attach meta data per order?

I'm currently using WP Shopping Cart.
Per order of a product, I need to attach some meta data such as size, frame options and frame colour. These different options change the price of the end product.
My first idea was to simply add a new product via the database each time, adding the necessary info to the product description and changing the price accordingly. However, this sounds like an ugly hack that will only lead me to problems down the track.
Is there any WordPress ecommerce system that allows this, or do you have a better solution to my problem?
Thanks
This comes a bit late but... Getshopped seems to meet you needs.
They call the product meta variations and I've linked you to the specific page.
Hope it helps!

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