The new Product Variants feature has been extended to allow custom variant values which customers can define themselves. Common use of custom variant values is accepting text to apply to the product, for example, Apple providing engravements on their iPod multimedia devices, and clothing stores that print custom text on the front and back of t-shirts.
Here is a short QuickTime movie showing how product variants are created for a t-shirt product, and extended on by providing custom variant values:
osCommerce Online Merchant Product Variants QuickTime Movie; 3.7MB
The primary change to support custom variant values went into the shopping cart class where it referenced each product in the shopping cart via its product ID. This brought in a limitation where it was not possible for a customer to add a t-shirt with different custom text values to their shopping cart incase they wanted to order the same t-shirt multiple times with different texts.
To allow this behaviour, each product in the shopping cart is now referenced by an automatically generated, customer specific, item ID where it is possible to order multiple quantities of a product, and now possible to order a product multiple times with different custom variant values.
osCommerce Online Merchant Product Info Page
It is now possible to mark a product variant as the default product variant on the Administration Tool to have default values already selected on the product information page. This shows above with the “Size” pull down selection list and the “Colour” radio button choices.
As this product accepts custom values, each time it is added to the shopping cart it is treated as a separate product in the shopping cart contents. This allows the product to be added multiple times with the same variant combination values but with different custom text values.
osCommerce Online Merchant Shopping Cart Page
This behaviour only applies to products with custom variant values where adding a normal standard product to the shopping cart multiple times would increment its quantity value.
The parsing of the product variant combinations are performed by modules assigned to the variant group, which can easily extend the behaviour of product variants to suit ones needs. This modular implementation has also introduced our first PHP 5 optimized abstract class which forces modules to follow an operation standard.
To further extend the Product Variants feature, we will also be looking at making it possible for customers to upload files when adding products to their shopping cart. This builds on the custom text possibility for t-shirts where logos and images can be attached to an order. The next set of changes will finalize the implementation for the 3.0 Alpha 5 release and be committed to /trunk/, with the file upload extension being looked into for the 3.0 Alpha 6 release.