Going Meta / Atelier – WooCommerce – Swiftslider

[alibey]

Hi Chaps,

Bear with me on this one, which you can safely put on the back burner as it is not some urgent help desk request. It’s basically end user feedback from someone who really like Atelier but wishes it could do more.

In trying to put together an eCommerce site for a client using Atelier, I came across some reactions to the product that I thought I would share publicly. Perhaps some other users of Atelier might find these of interest. It may also be of some interest to your developers. I just started using Atelier a few days ago, so I apologize in advance if I am misrepresenting here any of Atelier’s actual functionality due to my own lack of familiarity with the product.

In working with the WooCommerce and the Atelier theme, there appears to be ongoing confusion with respect to understanding what is typically meant in database design by meta attributes. In addition, there are several aspect of the interface that betray the poor architectural design considerations that are of crucial importance to a retailer.

In particular:

1. To a retailer, the notion that, say, “On Sale” would have to be shoehorned in as a Product Category type is rubbish. A product’s main characteristics are invariant. For example, it has a name, size, weight. This never changes. Then there are possibly supplementary attributes associated with a Product. These can include temporal dimensions, such as whether or not a Product Type is On Sale. Being on sale is not descriptive of the Product Type, except associatively. It is a temporal characteristic – designated by the retailer – that can and most likely will change several times over the course of the product’s shelf life. The Product’s Type (ie, its defining characteristics) does not change as a result of this. To collapse these two orthogonal attributes reflects on the design of the WooCommerce DB, which betrays a simple-minded understanding of the retail environment and/or the concepts of normalized DB design.

2. It is confusing to the customer to be presented with a list of product categories (say, Dogs, Cats, and Mice) that in addition also include On Sale. Nevertheless, this is currently the only way to delimit Products in a Page display, if one wishes to use the Shop Product Mini Widget of the Swift Page Builder. What you have to do is select those items that are on sale (which Woocommerce does automatically from the Sale Price/Regular Price delta), then scope these further by applying a Category delimiter. For example, “Summer Sale”. This seems to be the only way to display only those sale products that belong to some Sale Event category that can only be coarsely specified by the Category descriptor.

3. Unfortunately, there appears to be no way to for Products delimited in this fashion to be included as content in a Swift Slider instance. In effect, the Swift Slider does not allow the user to one-click an image to Checkout. This is a severe drawback, necessitating that both the Shop Product Mini AND the Swift Slider elements be displayed on a page that presents a Sale campaign using the slider format. This results in visual clutter, and is deeply confusing to the average end user (in this case, retail customers), who must first look at the slider, then find the item in question from a list someplace else on the page.

4. In looking at a Product page, one sees two parameters that are of interest: Custom Fields and Custom Product Attributes. First of all, it is confusing from a terminology standpoint as to what the distinction is between Fields and Attributes. Are these meant to represent columns in WP’s (non relational) database, or is this some mix between application-specific files and the WooCommerce DB schema? Arguably, however, this is an irrelevant nit.

That aside, it is clear that what WP mistakenly refers to as “meta data” are nothing more than extra fields that a programmer can add to the WP database, and then write extra code for it to appear somewhere on a theme. (The misuse of the term “meta” grates, as WP seem to think that adding an ordinary attribute such as MySpecialPrice is on the same level of abstraction as, say, PriceObject, which would be a meta attribute if it allowed one to define new types of price attributes (for example, prices that depend on some other event, such as number of purchases by the customer in the last month).

Moreover, it is nonsense to expect ordinary small retailers to have the necessary technical skills to extend the WooCommerce/and some Theme via PHP. What is needed is a functionally rich theme interface that would allow end-users to add custom attributes and have them appear as as custom Element types that have backend programmatic hooks with simple logic blocks built in.

A major severe short coming also applies to the so-called Custom Product Attribute, whose functional usefulness is limited, as it can only be displayed in some user window, but cannot be tied into to actual application programming at all via PHP, let alone the Swift Page Builder.

(Final note: it appears that a bug prevents a long description of a Product from appearing on a the Product page, which, redundantly, presents the image of a Product twice.)

I would be most interested in a response by anyone at Swiftideas. My client would love it, for example, if Atelier allows one to include one click checkouts on products included in a Swift Slider instance (ie, that the Slider can do more than just cycle through images, but actually provide ecommerce-related built in linkages.)

Cheers,
Ali

[Swift Ideas – Ed]

Hi Ali,

1/2) Not sure what you mean here – sale products definitely don’t have to be defined as a product category. The asset type filters provided in our product page builder assets are merely what feeds into the asset, as well as the choice of limiting this by category.

3) We have the ability to add an add to cart button to the slider (through the shortcode generator) – have you missed this, or are you looking for different/more functionality here? We don’t have a method of pulling in products to power the swift slider automatically at the moment, if that is what you are referring to.

4) This is wholly WooCommerce + WordPress – we have no control in the addition of this – but you can hide them from the page using the Screen Options (Custom Fields atleast – not sure about custom attributes).

It seems largely that your concerns are with WooCommerce + WordPress, rather than the theme itself. Obviously we can only work with what those platforms offer to us.

Hope that helps.

– Ed

[alibey]

Hi Ed

Adding the Woocommerce cart shortcode to your Slider enhanced the revolution slider tremendously.
thanks for the tip!

However, I am still wrestling with trying to make the actual slider dimensions smaller, as the built in SLIDER MAX HEIGHT toggle seems to have no effect.

One thing that would be nice is the ability to click on an image on the slider, and have it automatically be added the cart from the slider itself. Whatever eliminates the number of clicks to checkout is what I am after.

It looks like I might have to teach myself basic PHP after all to start adding these custom little features that I think would be really useful and further drive sales. Same as with CSS. I know a lot of styling tricks and techniques, and get by okay, but am no CSS expert!

Lastly, I have been asking you guys A LOT of questions since buying the product a week or two ago. I really like Atelier, and appreciate your patience as I learn how to be productive in this new (to me) env.

cheers,

ali

[Swift Ideas – Ed]

No problem – happy to help.

Can you provide a link to a page where the slider height isn’t being respected?

Unfortunately the button is the only method outside of products to add to cart at the moment, using the whole slide would likely not be very user friendly as they would probably expect to go to the product?

Again, we’re happy to help.

Thanks,

– Ed

[alibey]

it is the 7th slide on this page

https://needlepoint.land/index.php/end-of-summer-sale-2/

let me know if you need me to send the top secret login info again.

many thx

ali

ps i will be putting in the cart button tomorrow… i assuming the woocommerce
add to cart shortcode [cartid + sku] works with the slider.

[Swift Ideas – Ed]

I found the login in a previous topic. The reason the slider height isn’t respected here, is because your content on the first slide is much larger than the max (500). If we didn’t adjust to fit the content, then this would be cut off and would look very bad.

– Ed

[alibey]

hi ed,

I am closing this topic, and may start a different thread regarding the swift slider. User acceptance testing has started on the site i the US, so that will drive my feedback or any tickets. My client has a bit of a following in the needlepoint world, so the feedback should be very interesting, not just re my client’s site, but how atelier works from a UX perspective with a particular demographic.

Just so you know, needlepoint canvases (which is what my client sells) have a moire problem that is very difficult to solve; it is not a simple matter of taking a standard product pic and gimping it. This is why the pics need to be extremely large (800 by 800 works best, often thumbs from an image that size will look fairly horrible because of the moire issue. so 1200px w is even better, and start to greatly reduce if not eliminate moire, although there are other tricks that can be used), although of course I run them thru tiny png to try to keep them under 300kb.

The main issue I have found regarding pic sizes in the Swift slider so far is that specified the slider image by hand does not produce reliable results, such that if height is custom sized in the add slider panel to say 500px with proportional width, the actual result is an image that is far smaller than 500px h and looks fairly crappy.

will keep at it, and let you know the results later.

cheers,

ali

[Swift Ideas – Ed]

No problem – will look for your other topics and look forward to hearing results.

– Ed

[alibey]

my initial assessment was completely wrong. you can create product categories, per some canonical taxonomy. (say Dog or Cat widget).
you can also add tags (say, On Sale, or, Just In) that are semantically orthogonal.
You can then create a Menu option using a tag which will result in a page that consists of products with that tag.
This is done for you automatically, as it were, on a custom product list page.
You can also create a slideshow that has only items that comprise a particular tag universe. (all on sale products, for eg)
The only bummer is you cannot delete tags easily, so you have to be careful when inputting them, or deal with the complexities of deleting them using php.
maybe i will write a second plug in for that one of these days.

cheers
ali

[Swift Ideas – Ed]

WooCommerce doesn’t provide functionality to delete the tags? That seems odd, would assume there is already a plugin out there.

– Ed

[alibey]

i think i saw a plugin (third party if i remember) for deleting tags but i think it costs will look into this again. deffo not out of the box. the very good news is you can canonical product categories and supplementary tags that further refine product grouping. that was a big win.

cheers

ali

[Swift Ideas – Ed]

Great stuff.

– Ed