Ubercart

I don't remember what we initially wanted to do with this, but we got around it. I am currently in the process of making a module that is basically the abstraction of products. Here is the basic idea of what we did and how we accomplished it.

We sale school courses and a user can buy Q1, Q2, Q3, or Q4 or a combination for semesters or for a full year. We had this as an attribute that the user would select. Recently, we decided to create each course-quarter as it's own product. So math-Q1 and math-Q2 were it's own product. Similarly, a course may have materials that need to be purchased with it, and so the user can either say yes or no to those materials (the materials were also simply an attribute, but we decided to extract them as well for ease in reporting). So now the issue has become that we want a user to purchase Math and still see the same options (Q1, Q2, Q3, materials, etc.).

To overcome this, we created a new content type that we named the same thing, and then set up fields that would correspond to each product. So there is a quarter 1 field and you need to map it to the product that this corresponds to. Similarly, do the same for Q2, Q3, Q4, and course materials. Then in the content template body section, we wrote code that creates a form based off of these options (We are still using select boxes, but simply changing the '#type' to checkboxes would solve the issue above). The submit hook looks at the different selections, and adds the corresponding products to the cart. I had the code setup so that this could create a product kit if needed and add that to the cart, but we decided against that.

Anyways, this sounds kind of like what Ryan is getting at, but I agree that it would be nice if there was some other way to do this or to allow checkboxes for options. The code I wrote is very specific, and at the current time I don't see me having time to make it into a module that everyone could use, but I would be happy to answer any questions about more of the setup I created.

Having several attributes, each with a "Yes/No" option does basically work, but it's a pain to enter all those.

We're building a site, for example, where people register for conferences (each conference being a product.) But conference registration can get complicated. Aside from the differences in base price for different levels of group membership, there's issues of:

How many days will you be at the conference? Do individual days have specific prices? Do different meal plans (Vegetarian, Kosher, etc) have different prices? Does each session have a price attached to it?

Representing these as "Yes/No" radios would be fine; the real issue is one of generating these options.

For example, for the individual sessions example above, I'd have to create an attribute for *each* session, then create an "Yes" option with the price and a "No" option. This is at least 3 screens to click through per option. For an organization with a lot of conferences and a lot of options per conferences, this can really eat up time.

Whereas, if we could create one attribute, and then one option per "add-on", each of which adds to the price, this would go a lot faster. (And make more semantic sense - since each of these options would be grouped together.)