Hello Everyone,
Recently, I started to work with the Product Kit functionality in Ubercart 3 on a Drupal 7 installation. A desire to implement this functionality has always been on my list, but I never got around to messing with it seriously until now, mostly because it displayed a seemingly endless series of "problematic" behaviours on my heavily customized site.
Product Kit(s) are a useful way to bundle at least two individual Products together into a meaningful unit that can then be treated as a "new" product in the Ubercart system. A Product Kit, once created, is treated by Ubercart as a distinct and unique Product in Ubercart, which means that it can be assigned many of the useful attributes and processing that individual Products get (a custom discount, for example). Another very useful functionality is SKU breakout when moving past the sales cycle to the fulfillment cycle.
I have been tracking issues with Product Kit for about 5 years now, and banging away at them when I have time. Until recently, this functionality was a "nice to have" so I would attempt to fix whatever was wrong with it, then bump into another problem and turn it off again. My partner is tired of manually breaking up the SKUs that compose what I would call the "synthetic Product Kit" approach we have been historically using, that attempts to emulate the Product Kit functionality by simply creating a new Product that lists what a Product Kit would list if that functionality were to be working properly for us in the first place.
What has prompted this work is the fact that we recently shifted to using a "Third Party Logistics Provider" (3PL) to physically pick, pack and ship our orders. Order processing is no longer in-house and a mistake on that front quickly turns into a complicated mess. We also recognize the power of the Product Kit functionality and would like to take advantage of it.
So far, I have run into about 10 issues with respect to Product Kit. I suspect that most of them had more to do with my own site configuration than anything else, so they were not really something I would consider suitable for public consumption. However, in the last 24 hours I have bumped into a couple of issues that MAY be worth sharing publicly - and I would like to take advantage of other people's experience and perspective to accelerate through getting Product Kit working properly.
But is there an audience? www.ubercart.org is long-dead and www.drupal.org is not exactly pining to support D7U3 installations. Google is starting to fade in terms of uncovering now-ancient discussion of Ubercart in general and Product Kit specifically.
Does anyone else at www.backdropcms.org use the Product Kit functionality? If so, is it working for you? What problems are you experiencing? Would it be worthwhile to assign a "focus of attention" somewhere on www.backdropcms.org at the Product Kit functionality? Does one already exist somewhere that I am unaware of?
Thanks,
Graham Leach
Hi Graham
Nice to see you around again. Steve Moorhouse (aka Dr Albany) started work on a dedicated documentation site. He is open to collaborators:
http://ubercart.dev/