Well I’m into another slack month. It’s not really funny any more. Not that it ever was.
Still, I am cracking on with my plan. I have developed a module for Magento that allows store owners to export csv files with lists of what customer has purchased what products, including unregistered customers and which products customers have on their wishlists. All of which is tidily available from the admin panel. The next two things that will also broaden the magento work I can do are to ‘box up’ a hackish thing I’ve got (making use of the totally bogus method described here in footnote 2). This will end up as a spangly ‘bespoke price’ module that allows for the pricing of goods by dimensions. Height, Width, that sort of thing. Useful but very annoying to the Magento product model.
And by annoying I mean that if you wanted to sell, for example, sheets of wood between 1 and 10 meters high by 1 to 2 meters wide, it would, ideally be a ‘SImple Configurable’ product. This means it would actually have every possible size permutation (lets say 1m increments for the sake of argument but you see how that could easily get complicated by smaller units and larger sizes) as an individual simple product. The configuration would effectively be a select wrapper around whichever simple matched the config requirements. Now, while a max of 2 x 10 in 1 meters increments would be 20 products, the added complication of real-world use – say 2m x 10m but in 1cm increments would be 2000 products. All of which need pricing.
“Ah” you say, “CSV import the lot and do the grunt work on a spreadsheet in Excel”
Well, yes, you could do that. But that’s a lot of prices to maintain and update.
Which leaves either a module or a csv-generating script. The price formula is basically mechanised. An extension module is better than the csv import because the csv import mechanism has been known to be flaky and is just much less elegant than an extension and results in vastly less clutter on the hosting database. My module hack solution runs here but I’m working locally to put it in a ‘proper’ format. Or at least planning too.
Meanwhile what I’m actually doing is playing with this extension for wordpress-magento integration. There’s work in that, you see.
