Magento Help - Grouping products in cart

[chunkII123]

We currently are building a theme for a client who sells student day planners and the concept is “pick a planner, pick a cover, pick binding, pick accessories and inserts, add to cart.” We’re all new to Magento, but not new to programming; with that said how would we go about facilitating this functionality? Basically the current way the cart is set up is that each item/ product is a simple product and when adding to cart you’re unable to specify which cover goes to which planner.

For instance - If I ordered 3000 of the same planner, 3 different covers x 1000, and 3 different inserts x 1000 which insert would go with which cover? That is basically the dilemma we’re in. Customers can order line items but not grouped like they need to be. Our client wouldn’t know where to put the covers and inserts, so in a technical sense, Magento would only facilitate making payments online without actually placing the order. More of a hinderance than helpful.

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance!

-Josh

Beware of hackers bearing executables. Happy Hunting. 'irc.2600.net'

 

[jpadie]

never used magento. but treating the problem logically why not provide a 'configurator' for the client to make his planner then:

1. dynamically add the total configuration as a new 'product' in magento
2. add that new product to the cart in the quantities desired.

you would not then expose a list of products from within the magento product library to choose from but only be using the cart checkout functionality and the back-end order processing functionality.