Product Variations and User Uploads

Having a store with products and categories is great, but we need to be able to offer greater flexibility with our products. We looked at how to extend the information stored about our products, and extending products that way; but certain types of product, like apparel, need to allow the user to customize the product, often by selecting a variation of the product, or uploading images or text as part of the  order. In this chapter, you will learn: How to create customizable products How to assign uploaded files to individual product orders How we will maintain these uploads How to assign custom user-submitted data with individual product orders One important point to note is that this chapter links in greatly with Chapter 6,  The Shopping Basket; so some aspects of this chapter may be preparation for that, and some aspects of that chapter may require some looking back at this one. This chapter will primarily focus on integrating support for these customizable products to our framework as it is at the moment. Giving users choice Many products in e-commerce stores require some sort of choice from the customer, be it the size, color, or even the material. At the moment, we only have very basic products, which can simply be viewed by our customers. We need to extend this to allow customers to see variations of products, and to be able to choose their own variation of the product, before purchasing it.