Another Newbie!

[bengalcat]

I am trialling BP with a view to moving here when my contract expires with my current provider.
I am trying to see if BP will let me do various things.
I would like my customers to be able to search by colour.
I sell knitting yarn and have 20 or more colours in certain yarns.
I understand how to set up the colours as variants and am wondering if I can have a search function so that people could search for pink or blue yarn and see all the pink yarns available across all the ranges of yarn that I stock!
Many thanks!

Bengal Cat

[Rich]

In short - yes! On the following page, pretend "Screen Size" = "Colour":

http://www.demopark.co.uk/televisions-lcd.html

[bengalcat]

Thanks Rich.
My problem is that my yarns have names that do not reflect their colours. For example, one shade of a tweed yarn is called Blossom and it is pink. Another is called Smoulder and it is red. How could I make that sort of thing searchable?

[Rich]

You could assign the "real" colour names as product attributes (they work in a similar way to options). If you need to have multiple values per product for the same attribute name, i.e. multiple colour values per product, you can turn off the "one value per attribute" restriction in Configuration: E-Commerce Options.

[bengalcat]

Ooh! I understand! Easy when you know how! I shall give it a go - I am liking BP more and more, it is so much more flexible than my current ecommerce provider!

[ColinT]

Rich, this is great as it also solves a problem I am having - many of my products can have two of the same attribute (eg 2 colours), and I had assumed that I would have to choose only one colour, but now it seems that I can have both.

However, when I turn off the "one value per attribute" I get a warning that I shouldn't do this unless I specifically need to. Obviously the warning is there for a reason - am I potentially creating problems elsewhere by doing this?

Thanks,
Col.