Hi all,
This topic is to document and discuss a new funded feature named sourced variants. This stems from the explorations done over the years on Network and funding received from some hubs in France (approx. 12K euros).
The feature has been estimated in Github #13559.
As described by @Rachel in #13559:
The main idea is to give ability to the distributor to create products, but only products from producers they have access to.
In more detail:
When creating a variant, a producer or a hub will be able to link the variant to a “source”.
to start with, distributor variants will only be created through cloning
Each user profile will only be able to link their products to a source from whom they have a granted permission.
a new permission need to be created
Each time a user (owner) gives access to another user to its catalog, the user which was granted access can populate its own catalog with products from the owner. The source of these new products is set to the “original” owner. The user which was granted access won’t be able to change the source of the product.
Some other fields might not be available for a change : unit, product category and weight (others??)
We are starting with a small iteration that allows us to begin development, and iterate based on community and paying hubs’ feedback.
For now hub managers will be able to create a sourced variant from their existing product list by clicking on the actions menu in each individual variant and selecting “Create sourced variant”.
See first Github issue #13887 here. See a small prototype here.
-
only accounts that have “Manage products” + “Create sourced variants” permissions will be able to effectively use this. This is due to the fact that a hub needs to be able to see the list of products that they can create sourced variants from. We will likely iterate on this later on.
-
Sourced variants will be part of the original product for now. They will have a different hub “owner”, which is a new field for variants, to be displayed in the list as a new column, and filterable, as described in this issue
-
A new type of permissions needs to be created. This will be activated and displayed exactly as the existing permissions. @dcook said that it’s easier to just implement it in the Permissions page UI already, rather than manually editing the database.
-
Sourced variants will temporarily be recognised by a link/chain emoji icon on the left side of the row. We will change this later
-
Sourced variants fields will be freely editable for now, we’ll discuss later if some of those fields need to be locked or not
We are currently still evaluating if this will be hidden behind a feature toggle or not. Also, this is just the start of the development of this functionality, and as we progress we will build on top of it.
If you would like to provide feedback, feel free to reply here or join the conversation in slack at #sourced-variants.
Thank you!