Workflow For Adding Many Products with Similar Options

Question

I'm working on a site that will have many products with similar options/attributes that a user would have to choose when adding to cart... think of an add to cart form for a t-shirt where you choose a color and size. This site does not need to manage stock/inventory.

The options I can imagine are:

1. Create simple products with custom options one at a time.
2. Create simple products with common custom options, but duplicate them to create good starting points.
3. Configurable products with attribute sets, which implies the user would have to create associated products for all the attributes they want to show up.
4. Your brilliant suggestion

2 is my best guess and 3 and 1 would be very time consuming. So what's number 4?

Thanks!

Answer 1

So what I would suggest is to go for the Configurable Product option as well this is what it was created for. I understand that this can be time consuming for the user. For this I see you have a couple of options.

1. Use the Quick Create option in the Magento admin. This should allow you to create the Configurable product first and specify which options are configurable. Then on the associated products tab you can create multiple simple products quicker.
2. Create some form of import process that creates the required products via code. You could do this via either an admin module or simply an import script.

I would personally go with option 1 and let the admin create the products as less "should" go wrong since this is core functionality.