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WooCommerce: Utilizing Custom Attributes

I must admit, I have a quite a love/hate relationship when it comes to WordPress.  As with some frameworks, it often takes a bit of rewiring to be not so... controlling.  On the other end of the spectrum, it has an enormous community, and you'll almost never be out of work when it comes to being able to build and support.  Plus, to be fair, it is not as targetted directly to developers unlike other Content Management systems like October CMS.

Back on topic, I have recently been given a requirement to integrate our internally developed product CRM with WooCommerce, and would like to cover one important aspect of it: custom attributes.  It has taken a lot of research to making it just the way we needed to, so allow me to share some of the things I have learned along the way.

First, we need to add our products with our custom attributes, this topic, while it was available, didn't seem to be as documented as attributes with set options (terms) attached to it, so it was a bit of trial and error.  So, that was done this way:

Take note of the name and value for the custom attribute "catalogue_id" - one of the problems I faced was that our products each belong to a separate catalogue, and needs to be filtered for the customer depending on the catalogue that applies to them only.  When products are being listed in the shopfront, the filter woocommerce_product_query_meta_query is triggered.  Therefore, in the functions, I have placed the additional filter:

Notice here how I am having to query not just one attribute, but all of them in the one query - which is why I have had to mask the value as _cid_####_ so it then would not incorrectly pick up another attribute.  This was a little annoying.

Finally, and this was one of the more tricker alterations of this implementation, this does not change the product counts in the category list widget.  It was of no surprise that this was primarily being performed by WordPress itself, and I didn't want to alter much of this code - so to suit, I designed my own query and rendered out the LI elements in the same way that WooCommerce would have:

As you can see, this gave me the added bonus of being able to put a category for "All Products" as well.

So there you have it!  We've covered a lot of bases with what can be quickly acheived with custom attributes.  Please share what experiments you come up with as well.

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