Correct admin menu location for an "Order Attributes" extension for Magento 2

Question

I recently purchased the Order Attributes for Magento 2 extension from Amasty which I'm happy with, however, I believe the extension menu location is incorrect but Amasty tell me it's not.

They've placed the Order Attributes configuration in the "Sales" menu under a new sub-heading "Amasty Order Attributes".

I believe they should be placed under the "Stores > Attributes" menu.

We use Magento every day and consider the sales menu for everything related to a specific order e.g. orders, invoices, shipments, credit memos.

Order attributes are a setting that only needs to be configured once not for every order. Once an order attribute is created we can use it on every order we create. Just like product attributes which one created can be used for all new and existing products.

I emailed Amasty with my concern and they replied:

We developed the module Order Attributes according to our customers' requirements.

And according to them the order attributes tab should be placed in 'Sales', as it directly connected with Orders processing.

From the technical point of view, it is also necessary to be placed there as our order attributes table is kept with Magento orders table.

So to avoid any conflicts with Magento, the tab was necessary to be placed in Stores.

We deeply apologize if it is not very comfortable for you, but the module was developed according to the logic I have described.

I then responded:

Do you have any link to the Magento 2 developer guidelines for menu items? I'm curious to learn more about what you are saying but I can't find the info anywhere.

I still think it is impossible that Magento suggest the sales menu for order attributes so I'm eager to see for myself

They replied:

You cannot find this guidelines as it is the internal documentation and we cannot share it, unfortunately.

As I have said previously, you see that the tab 'Orders' (which is the default Magento tab) is situated in the tab 'Sales' and to avoid any conflicts with Magento functionality, our developers placed the tab with Order Attributes also in the tab 'Sales'.

These two functionalities 'Orders' (Magento) and 'Order Attributes' (Amasty) are closely connected with each other and their tables (from which the information is taken) should be placed in one and the same place from the technical point of view.

So I come to Stack Exchange to ask who is right here? Me or Amasty? And is there any Magento 2 developer documentation that anyone can link me to that confirms the "technical point of view" that Amasty have described.

As a user it just doesn't make sense to have "Order Attributes" in a sales menu.

Answer 1

From the User perspective you are right. Regarding Magento Guidelines it has some changes in older and current version.

In earlier magento versions the core team keeps the attribute and the corresponding entity together. For example Manage Attributes menu will show up under Catalog Menu

See the below link for earlier version

https://docs.magento.com/m1/ce/user_guide/Resources/Images/catalog-attributes-manage.png

In Latest versions from M2 (Nov 2015) the core team has changed the position of attributes under store menu.

https://docs.magento.com/m2/ee/user_guide/Resources/Images/attributes-customer.png

But at the same time you have to understand the situation of the extension vendor, they want their code base to be standard & same for all their customers. So it is their technical decision to keep the Menu Under Sales tab.

The request you are asking is a simple customization, which can be done by simple tweaking. But they have an overhead of maintaining different version of code for different customers.