Adding Attributes

Before we getting into adding new attributes and attributes, lets look at the scope of attributes and the naming of attributes and the values.

Attribute Scope

Attributes in WordPress can have one of two scopes

• Common: attribute can be used by any product, the information below is about adding attributes that can be used by any product.
• Product Specific: an attribute and also apply to a single product, these are talked about in the section on editing a product.

Naming Attributes and Values

The site should use language that is accessible to anyone interested in sailboats, this includes novices and experts and all those in between. As such attribute names and values should be full words and abbreviations should be avoided. They should be typed in title case like the title of this section, with each word capitalized except for conjunctions, words like “and”, “or”, “the”, “for”.

Existing Attributes

When you get to the attributes page below you will see a long list, not all of them are meant to be used for variations. The initial set of attributes meant to be used for variations are listed below. You can review the values for each attribute on the attribute page.

• Pin Diameter
• Manufacturer Color
• Rope Size
• Unit
• Wire Size
• Wire Type

While reviewing the products you may find the need to add additional attributes and/or values.

Adding Attributes and Values

To get to the common attributes you need to in the WordPress admin area / dashboard. Scroll down the menu in the left column till you see “Products” and click on it. The products menu will open and one of the sub-menu choices will be “Attributes”, click on “Attributes”.

This will show a page where the main content looks like the image to the right.

The right side is used for adding new attributes, the left side shows the existing attributes.

This part of the page is where you add a new attribute, generally all you need to do is fill in the name and click on “Add Attribute”.

For attributes meant for variations, generally you will not want to enable archives. This is useful for attributes like “Vendor” where you want a page listing products for a specific vendor.

For “Default sort order” are words (see vendor as an example), you will want to set this to “Name”. For attributes with numeric values this is best left set to “Custom order” as it will allow you to rearrange the order of the values.

In the right side of the attributes page is a list of existing attributes. You can edit the values for an attribute by click on the attribute name or the “Configure terms” link for the attribute.

This will take you to a page where the main content is like that seen in the image to the right. You attribute values in the same as attributes. Fill in the name and click on the button that says “Add new attribute“, where attribute is name of the attribute you adding the value to. In the case of the image this is “Rope Size”.

For attributes set to allow custom ordering, the last column has a 3 line graphic, you can use that to drag and drop the values to your preferred order.