Here is an idea for a feature in the 7.x-2.x version.

When I add an image to a node set with unlimited number of images, I add one image at a time without the whole edit page having to refresh. I think BPC could handle product creation the same way, if in addition to the "Bulk add products" page, BPC could have a seperate "Add multiple products" page to enter a lot of different products quickly. This page would have an "add" or "create" button that you could press as often as you like, quickly adding the product specified by your selections. To prevent adding the same product twice, each time you click the "add or create" button, it could become greyed out until an attribute changes.

The first area of the page would be the sku, title, price and description. Then, you can select the attribute, (such as color and size) and click the "add button" that would create the one product specified by your checkboxes/radio buttons. Manually adding a whole lot of products would become very easy this way because then, you could quickly change the radio button from red to blue and click the "add button" again.

If this functionality existed, it would make it easy to modify the price, title, sku, or description for each product during product creation. I looked at #1251214: Price Value Changes dependent on the attribute. and think that this may be a better way than having to set your product price to $0 and attaching a price to an attribute.

This option would satisfy multiple situations for customization. In my case, I would like the ability to modify the sku for each product, such as, size5 may be sku "xxx123+attribute variables" and size 7 may be "xxx456+attribute variables".

Another benefit this would have is for SEO reasons, Google would like us being able to add a description with available tokens. ex1. "You are going to love this [commerce-product:color] shirt. It is made of [commerce-product:material] and is size [commerce-product:size]." or ex2. "This shirt is [bulk_defaults:combination_labels]." Even if tokens weren't available, changing a single word or phrase in the description for each product would be easier than having to re-enter the whole description each time for multiple products that are similar.

After-thought: What if we create the product display first, and have a way to create products for it from the edit screen of that node?

I know this may be a lot, but I wanted to give some input that may help think creatively about the user interface of product creation in the 7.x-2.x version. Any thoughts?

Comments

sven.lauer’s picture

sven.lauer commented

Thanks, this is very useful.

A lot of nice ideas, though in how far this is going to materialize soon, I can't say. There is also the question whether bpc is the best module to do this in, at least as far as "editing from the display node" is going to happen. More likely, there will be a dedicated "Edit product group" page from which you can add / edit / remove products (and edit the "static fields" of all products in one go). Such a "product group" entity is necessary if we want to be able to do any sensible bulk-editing, display nodes are a poor substitute for those.

The one downside to this approach is that there is another screen / entity (products, product groups, and display nodes). This could be mitigated somewhat by providing an optional module that allows to display product groups directly (and/or turning commerce_bpc into a proper product_group_ui which acts as a complete replacement to product_ui, so that the product level is in effect hidden).

In the mean time, Commerce (Product Display Manager) has some functionality similar to what you describe (though the project has not been updated since July, apparently).