Magento

In the Manage Categories area of the catalog management section I can click on a category in the left column and then click a “Category Products” tab in the right column and get a list of products.

What is the point of this page?

There is an unlabeled select list on the left side with the options ANY/YES/NO I have no idea what it is supposed to do.  I can check a checkbox next to each product listing, but again, what function does this accomplish?

I cannot click on each product to be taken to the product information/edit page (that is a usability snafu there), I see the ability to search through the product list I guess but without being able to access product details am I supposed to write down with pen and paper the information I’m looking for when I find it?

This is in IE of course, in FF I can’t even get to that page. Notice in the attached screenshot there should be a category listing in the left column, instead all I get is a horizontal scroll bar.

Now… CATALOG>MANAGE PRODUCTS

I get a full listing of 104 default products. Not arranged by categories or anything, just listed raw.  Lets say I want to delete a product, and why not? There are 104 products I don’t sell, why not delete them?

So… every other cart program I’ve ever used has had buttons directly on product listing screens to turn a product on/off (hide from view or make available) and of course to delete it.  No such luck here.

So I click on a product… whoops, get an error:

Page of 1 | View 20 30 50 100 200 per page| Total 0 records found
Reset Filter


Search

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 8192 bytes) in /home/cm/public_html/app/code/core/Mage/Adminhtml/Block/Widget/Grid/Column/Renderer/Number.php on line 1

How much memory is this software sucking down?

Also, I’m not sure if its my system or your coding, but IE 7 keeps crashing for me all day when trying to view the install.

Click thumbnail to see full-size image

Chris,

maybe you have JS disabled in IE. Have you tested Magento on other browsers ? On my IE 7 (Vista PL) everything works fine.

About memory , the profiler says : Memory usage: real: 8912896, emalloc: 10635904 . You can also turn it on to see memory allocation per page. You do this in Configuration->Developer.

I hope this helps

Like Chris I also find the product/category-management to still be a bit clumsy. Seeing the raw list of products without the hierarchy of the categories does not seem to be so helpful. Also, having to click on each individual product to delete it is quite time-consuming, how about batch processing of these things? Talking of which, I wanted to get a clear look at how the shop is constructed, so I deleted a few categories. This worked perfectly, however, the products originally connected to these categories still seem to be there - there is still the standard 104 products in the raw list.

ChrisWebPub - 07 September 2007 06:16 AM

In the Manage Categories area of the catalog management section I can click on a category in the left column and then click a “Category Products” tab in the right column and get a list of products.

What is the point of this page?

This tab is where you associate products to a category. This is managed per store.

ChrisWebPub - 07 September 2007 06:16 AM

There is an unlabeled select list on the left side with the options ANY/YES/NO I have no idea what it is supposed to do.  I can check a checkbox next to each product listing, but again, what function does this accomplish?

This select is to allow you to filter through the catalog products. Any - are all products of the catalog. Yes - Products belonging to this category. No - Products not belonging to this category.

ChrisWebPub - 07 September 2007 06:16 AM

I cannot click on each product to be taken to the product information/edit page (that is a usability snafu there), I see the ability to search through the product list I guess but without being able to access product details am I supposed to write down with pen and paper the information I’m looking for when I find it?

We are planning on adding the ability to edit a product directly from this list, and have some summarization of the product in some pop-up. The problem of adding to much info in this list is the width of the page.

ChrisWebPub - 07 September 2007 06:16 AM

This is in IE of course, in FF I can’t even get to that page. Notice in the attached screenshot there should be a category listing in the left column, instead all I get is a horizontal scroll bar.

We will look into this issue in IE. We tested this in FF and did get this page. Could you try and reproduce this errors on the demo store (http://demo-admin.magentocommerce.com/admin/ u:admin p:123123)

ChrisWebPub - 07 September 2007 06:16 AM

Now… CATALOG>MANAGE PRODUCTS

I get a full listing of 104 default products. Not arranged by categories or anything, just listed raw.  Lets say I want to delete a product, and why not? There are 104 products I don’t sell, why not delete them?

So… every other cart program I’ve ever used has had buttons directly on product listing screens to turn a product on/off (hide from view or make available) and of course to delete it.  No such luck here.

So I click on a product… whoops, get an error:

Page of 1 | View 20 30 50 100 200 per page| Total 0 records found
Reset Filter


Search



Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 8192 bytes) in /home/cm/public_html/app/code/core/Mage/Adminhtml/Block/Widget/Grid/Column/Renderer/Number.php on line 1


How much memory is this software sucking down?

As this is an early preview release, we are still working on improving the catalog (and all) grids, and mass management should be included in future versions.

ChrisWebPub - 07 September 2007 06:16 AM

Also, I’m not sure if its my system or your coding, but IE 7 keeps crashing for me all day when trying to view the install.

We tested this version in IE7 and did not run into the issues you describe.

I would like to thank you for testing this early version of Magento, please keep on letting us know of any issues you might find so that we can look into them fix them and improve Magento.

Thank you,

Yoav

Well Yoav, the point in posting for many of those things was to indicate it is not obvious what the controls are for, hence it is a usability issue. Paying “guess the button” isn’t fun for everyone, and while it is good that I can come here and get an explanation, a user shouldn’t have to do that. Controls, especially for someone who has used similar software for years, should be intuitive & obvious, or at the very least include labels/mouseovers/little-question-mark-links (ie What’s This?) that explain what the thing does.

It is good to hear though that you will be making mass editing in the future, that really should be a priority.  The easier you can make it to admin the software, the more likely it is people will adopt the software.