This Spree extension allows you to override the default behaviour of Spree when displaying a product. When the customer selects a product from the products index page, by default Spree will display the details of the selected product including all of it's variants, e.g. sizes and colors.
This extension allows you to override the default behaviour, when a customer selects a product from the products index page, a new page is displayed similar to the products index page displaying all product variants grouped by a specified option type, for example color. If I had a product called 'TeesTanks' with a number of color variants say red, white, and grey a new index like page is displayed with an entry for each of the color variants. Each entry will have a link in the following format:
/products/[product name]/[option type value]
example:
Red varaint = /products/teestanks/option/red
White variant = /products/teestanks/option/white
When the a link is selected, the information for that variant is displayed including images linked to the variant and a short description specific to that variant.
To have the variants displayed and grouped by an option type a new fields has been added to the product table called display_variants_by_option which is available in the product edit form. The "name" of the option type that you want to group by is specified in this field. For example if you defined an option type called "TT_Color" to hold the color variants of your product then you can set the display_variants_by_option to this value and the extension will group all variants for the selected product by the "TT_Color" option type values.
If no value is specified in this field then the default Spree behaviour will be used.
A new short_description field has been added to the variants table that will be displayed as the description for each variant.
** Please note that the extension will use the images and short description from the first variant found in each group. For example if you created Red Small, Red Meduim and Red Large varaints for a product in this order then the images and short description of the "Red Small" variant will be used as it is the first one that was created.
The show page (products/show_variant.html) for the selected variant in this extension is an example only and will need to be modified to suit. This can be done by overriding the products/show_variant.html view in your site extension or similar.
The extenstion allows you to override the default root or products/index page by displaying a paginated list of all active variants rather than a list of all the products. Product variants that belong to a product that has been set to be grouped by a nominated option type will still be grouped, if the product has not been set to be grouped then all product variants will be displayed.
This behaviour is switched off by default, to get this behaviour to work you will need to uncomment the following two routes within the routes file:
map.root :controller => "products", :action => "show_all_variants"
map.show_all_variants "products/index", :controller => "products", :action => "show_all_variants"
Tests